en-US Fri, 13 Jan 2017 07:25:29 -0800 60 144 41 http://www.goodreads.com/images/layout/goodreads_logo_144.jpg 13721709
Looking both east and west, in bulletins from the past and from far afield, Oliver Burkeman introduces us to an unusual group of people who share a single, surprising way of thinking about life. Whether experimental psychologists, terrorism experts, Buddhists, hardheaded business consultants, Greek philosophers, or modern-day gurus, they argue that in our personal lives, and in society at large, it's our constant effort to be happy that is making us miserable. And that there is an alternative path to happiness and success that involves embracing failure, pessimism, insecurity, and uncertainty—the very things we spend our lives trying to avoid. Thought-provoking, counterintuitive, and ultimately uplifting, The Antidote is the intelligent person's guide to understanding the much-misunderstood idea of happiness.]]> 256 Oliver Burkeman 1429947608 Ramana 0 currently-reading 4.04 2012
author: Oliver Burkeman
name: Ramana
average rating: 4.04
book published: 2012
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]]> 25899336 For readers of Atul Gawande, Andrew Solomon, and Anne Lamott, a profoundly moving, exquisitely observed memoir by a young neurosurgeon faced with a terminal cancer diagnosis who attempts to answer the question What makes a life worth living?
 
At the age of thirty-six, on the verge of completing a decade’s worth of training as a neurosurgeon, Paul Kalanithi was diagnosed with stage IV lung cancer. One day he was a doctor making a living treating the dying, and the next he was a patient struggling to live. Just like that, the future he and his wife had imagined evaporated. When Breath Becomes Air, which features a Foreword by Dr. Abraham Verghese and an Epilogue by Kalanithi’s wife, Lucy, chronicles Kalanithi’s transformation from a naïve medical student “possessed,” as he wrote, “by the question of what, given that all organisms die, makes a virtuous and meaningful life” into a young neurosurgeon at Stanford, guiding patients toward a deeper understanding of death and illness, and finally into a patient and a new father to a baby girl, confronting his own mortality.
 
What makes life worth living in the face of death? What do you do when the future, no longer a ladder toward your goals in life, flattens out into a perpetual present? What does it mean to have a child, to nurture a new life as another fades away? These are some of the questions Kalanithi wrestles with in this profoundly moving, exquisitely observed memoir.
 
Paul Kalanithi died in March 2015, while working on this book, yet his words live on as a guide and a gift to us all. “I began to realize that coming face to face with my own mortality, in a sense, had changed nothing and everything,” he wrote. “Seven words from Samuel Beckett began to repeat in my head: ‘I can’t go on. I’ll go on.’” When Breath Becomes Air is an unforgettable, life-affirming reflection on the challenge of facing mortality and on the relationship between doctor and patient, from a gifted writer who became both.


From the Hardcover edition.]]> 208 Paul Kalanithi Ramana 0 currently-reading 4.35 2016
author: Paul Kalanithi
name: Ramana
average rating: 4.35
book published: 2016
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]]> 2547 The Prophet, is one of the most beloved classics of our time. Published in 1923, it has been translated into more than twenty languages, and the American editions alone have sold more than nine million copies.

The Prophet is a collection of poetic essays that are philosophical, spiritual, and, above all, inspirational. Gibran’s musings are divided into twenty-eight chapters covering such sprawling topics as love, marriage, children, giving, eating and drinking, work, joy and sorrow, housing, clothes, buying and selling, crime and punishment, laws, freedom, reason and passion, pain, self-knowledge, teaching, friendship, talking, time, good and evil, prayer, pleasure, beauty, religion, and death.]]> 127 Kahlil Gibran 000100039X Ramana 0 currently-reading 4.24 1923
author: Kahlil Gibran
name: Ramana
average rating: 4.24
book published: 1923
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]]> 21207417 Made Easy to Understand

With illustrations, abstract, explanatory rendering (without
Sanskrit verses) of all verses in simple, modern English;
copious notes and gloss on difficult verses and words;
simpler important verses are highlighted
for the first time readers; 83 quotations from
the Bhagavad-Gita; Chapter and Section headings,
Glossary of Sanskrit words used, A simple
meditation technique and Cross Reference.

]]> 114 Ramananda Prasad Ramana 0 currently-reading 4.00 2014
author: Ramananda Prasad
name: Ramana
average rating: 4.00
book published: 2014
rating: 0
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date added: 2016/12/26
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