Gardner Publicity

(Tarcher/Penguin, September 2010)

“An eloquent and honest account . . . an inspiration.”

—Peter Matthiessen, author of The Snow Leopard

In this profound and courageous memoir, Olivia Ames Hoblitzelle describes how her husband’s Alzheimer’s diagnosis challenged them to live the spiritual teachings they had embraced during their lives together. Ten Thousand Joys & Ten Thousand Sorrows provides a wise and compassionate vision for maintaining hope and grace in the face of life’s greatest challenges.

“A heart-felt, wise, and tender book. Enormously helpful.”

—Jack Kornfield, author of After the Ecstasy, the Laundry

 (Tarcher/Penguin, February 2010)

In his new book, Pocket Peace: Effective Practices for Enlightened Living, Allan Lokos (Tarcher/Penguin, February, 2010) offers a blueprint of simple exercises based on the 10 “Paramis,” or Perfection Practices, described in Buddhist philosophy. Lokos beautifully articulates these great spiritual teachings and distills them into concentrated dosages to address the realities of everyday life. He skillfully weaves together rich learning moments from his own life experiences with enlightened, yet profound lessons on virtues such as generosity, patience, loving kindness, and truthfulness.

In her new book, The Self-Aware Parent: 19 Lessons for Growing with Your Children (BookSurge Publishing, October 2009), Cathy Cassani Adams provides her readers with a practical guide that is full of tools, encouragement, and compelling stories that reflect on the everyday challenges of being a parent. Drawing on her professional experiences as a licensed social worker and certified parent coach, as well as her own personal experiences as a mother, Adams offers information on how to create a relationship with your child while maintaining a healthy relationship with yourself; how to balance self-awareness with self-acceptance; and how effective parenting depends on being both emotionally and physically present with your child. Her essays on tantrums, discussing feelings, discipline, and education will offer a glimpse into the future and help you to really think about what kind of parent you want to be.

 The Self-Aware Parent skillfully weaves together rich learning moments from Adams’s own everyday experiences with practical, yet profound lessons, such as:

• Taking care of yourself makes you a better parent
• Accepting your children for who they are is the key to their self-worth
• Discussing children’s feelings with them is essential at every stage of development
• Understanding children’s misbehavior makes discipline less daunting
• Slowing down and simplifying makes parenting more enjoyable
• Practicing self-awareness leads to a healthy and trusting relationship with your children

The Self-Aware Parent is a highly accessible, inspirational, and easy-to-follow guide. Adams will infuse readers with her wisdom and warmth, and help parents to recognize that part of parenthood is simply staying present enough to enjoy it.

Sadly, some lives cannot be understood until after death.

 So it was with Anne Ford. A successful, charming beauty queen, model, and fashion designer during the 1950s, this glamour girl about town was poisoned by internal demons and the permissive Southern California culture of the 1960s and 70s. She ended her life as an alcoholic street person, stabbed and strangled in a burned-out building in West Hollywood. Years later, her daughter, the writer Laurel Saville, began the long process of unraveling the twin trajectories of this unusual life.

In her riveting memoir, Postmortem, Saville gives voice to her eccentric West Hollywood. Postmortem reads as much as a fascinating social history as a portrait of a family. childhood, where she was raised within a community of hippies, musicians, and artists who orbited her charismatic mother. While these artists were merely “just people who hung out in paint-spattered pants” to Saville, her mother was surrounded by the “Ferus group” from the seminal Sunset Strip gallery where Andy Warhol got his start, which included artists such as John Altoon, Craig Kauffman, Billy Al Bengston, Ed Ruscha, and Ed Kienholz. This former Miss Redondo Beach and Chouinard Art Institute graduate seemed to lead a charmed and exciting life, dating Marlon Brando, designing a fashion line, and partying with hippies at the legendary Barney’s Beanery.

However, Saville doesn’t let these intriguing, colorful details blunt her memories of her often harrowing childhood. She reveals with brutal honesty, yet without resentment, an increasingly absent commercial interior designer father and a narcissistic mother who experiences a ghastly decline into alcoholism, mental illness, homelessness, and ultimately, a violent, tragic death. Despite all the pain and turmoil Saville reveals in Postmortem, her revelation and acceptance of Ford’s complex and troubled life enables her “to believe that loving my mother was not only possible, but necessary.”

 Postmortem is a beautifully written tale that is as much a story about the stunning Anne Ford as it is about her steadfast daughter, Laurel Saville, who is able to look beyond the circumstances of her childhood and build a loving, successful, and stable life for herself.

Without Buddha I Could Not Be a Christian by Paul F. Knitter

(Oneworld Publications, October 2009)

A young Roman Catholic priest experiences Vatican II in Rome, leaves the priesthood, gets married, and becomes a leading scholar on religious pluralism.  Later in life he finds that his wife's Buddhism leads him down a path that enables him to revise and reaffirm his Christian identity. Honest and unflinching, Without Buddha I Could Not Be a Christian (Oneworld Publications, October 2009) narrates a journey of “double belonging” that many Christians are exploring.

Paul F. Knitter is Paul Tillich Professor of Theology, Union Theological Seminary, New York. A leading advocate of religious pluralism, he is the author of over ten books on the subject. He lives in New York, NY. 

Notable Media Placements

"Beliefs," New York Times, October 10, 2009

Shambhala Sun, November 2009 issue

"State of Belief" Radio Interview

Library Journal, October 1, 2009, *Starred Review*

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