The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Ekhart Tolle’s message is simple: living in the now is the truest path to happiness and enlightenment. And while this message may not seem stunningly original or fresh, Tolle’s clear writing, supportive voice, and enthusiasm make this an excellent manual for anyone who’s ever wondered what exactly “living in the now” means. Foremost, Tolle is a world-class teacher, able to explain complicated concepts in concrete language. More importantly, within a chapter of reading this book, readers are already holding the world in a different container–more conscious of how thoughts and emotions get in the way of their ability to live in genuine peace and happiness.

Tolle packs a lot of information and inspirational ideas into The Power of Now. (Topics include the source of Chi, enlightened relationships, creative use of the mind, impermanence, and the cycle of life.) Thankfully, he’s added markers that symbolize “break time.” This is when readers should close the book and mull over what they just read. As a result, The Power of Now reads like the highly acclaimed A Course in Miracles–a spiritual guidebook that has the potential to inspire just as many study groups and change just as many lives for the better. –Gail Hudson

Author: Eckhart Tolle
Paperback:  224 pages
Company: New World Library  (2004-09-29)
ISBN: 1577314808
List Price: $14.00
Amazon Price: $6.95
Used Price: $6.50

How to Take the Grrrr Out of Anger
Anger is a part of life. We can’t avoid it, we shouldn’t stuff it, and we can’t make it go away. Kids need help learning how to manage their anger. This book speaks directly to kids and offers strategies they can start using immediately. Blending tips and ideas with jokes and funny cartoons, it guides kids to understand that anger is normal and can be expressed in many ways—some healthy, some not. It teaches them how to recognize anger in themselves and others, how to deal with situations and emotions (loneliness, guilt, frustration, fear) that lead to or mask anger, and how to deal with the anger they feel. Young readers learn that violence is not acceptable and there are better, safer ways to resolve conflicts. They also discover what to do when people around them are angry, how to get help, and how to locate other resources (books, hotlines, school groups) when they need more support.

Author: Elizabeth Verdick, Marjorie Lisovskis
Paperback:  112 pages
Company: Free Spirit Publishing  (2002-12)
ISBN: 1575421178
List Price: $8.95
Amazon Price: $4.61
Used Price: $5.17

Water for Elephants: A Novel
Jacob Jankowski says: “I am ninety. Or ninety-three. One or the other.” At the beginning of Water for Elephants, he is living out his days in a nursing home, hating every second of it. His life wasn’t always like this, however, because Jacob ran away and joined the circus when he was twenty-one. It wasn’t a romantic, carefree decision, to be sure. His parents were killed in an auto accident one week before he was to sit for his veterinary medicine exams at Cornell. He buried his parents, learned that they left him nothing because they had mortgaged everything to pay his tuition, returned to school, went to the exams, and didn’t write a single word. He walked out without completing the test and wound up on a circus train. The circus he joins, in Depression-era America, is second-rate at best. With Ringling Brothers as the standard, Benzini Brothers is far down the scale and pale by comparison.

Water for Elephants is the story of Jacob’s life with this circus. Sara Gruen spares no detail in chronicling the squalid, filthy, brutish circumstances in which he finds himself. The animals are mangy, underfed or fed rotten food, and abused. Jacob, once it becomes known that he has veterinary skills, is put in charge of the “menagerie” and all its ills. Uncle Al, the circus impresario, is a self-serving, venal creep who slaps people around because he can. August, the animal trainer, is a certified paranoid schizophrenic whose occasional flights into madness and brutality often have Jacob as their object. Jacob is the only person in the book who has a handle on a moral compass and as his reward he spends most of the novel beaten, broken, concussed, bleeding, swollen and hungover. He is the self-appointed Protector of the Downtrodden, and… he falls in love with Marlena, crazy August’s wife. Not his best idea.

The most interesting aspect of the book is all the circus lore that Gruen has so carefully researched. She has all the right vocabulary: grifters, roustabouts, workers, cooch tent, rubes, First of May, what the band plays when there’s trouble, Jamaican ginger paralysis, life on a circus train, set-up and take-down, being run out of town by the “revenooers” or the cops, and losing all your hooch. There is one glorious passage about Marlena and Rosie, the bull elephant, that truly evokes the magic a circus can create. It is easy to see Marlena’s and Rosie’s pink sequins under the Big Top and to imagine their perfect choreography as they perform unbelievable stunts. The crowd loves it–and so will the reader. The ending is absolutely ludicrous and really quite lovely. –Valerie Ryan

Author: Sara Gruen
Paperback:  350 pages
Company: Algonquin Books  (2007-04-09)
ISBN: 1565125606
List Price: $13.95
Amazon Price: $5.70
Used Price: $4.50

The Mindful Way through Depression: Freeing Yourself from Chronic Unhappiness

Author: J. Mark G. Williams, John D. Teasdale, Zindel V. Segal, Jon Kabat-Zinn
Paperback:  273 pages
Company: The Guilford Press  (2007-06-01)
ISBN: 1593851286
List Price: $19.95
Amazon Price: $12.28
Used Price: $12.29