East And West Series

From the Booker Prize-winning, bestselling author of Midnight's Children and The Satanic Verses comes nine stories that reveal the oceanic distances and the unexpected intimacies between East and West. Daring, extravagant, comical and humane, this book renews Rushdie's stature as a storyteller who can enthrall and instruct us with the same sentence. "Richly nuanced, full or humor, bitter anger, an embracing tenderness, and a buyancy of language." —Boston Globe

West Rock and East Rock are bold and beautiful features around New Haven, Connecticut. They resemble monumental gateways (or time-tried sentinels) and represent a moment in geologic time when the North American and African continents began to separate and volcanism affected much of Connecticut. The rocks attracted the attention of poets, painters, and naturalists when beliefs rose about the spiritual dimensions of nature in the early 19th century. More than two dozen artists, including Frederick Church, George Durrie, and John Weir, captured their magic and produced an assortment of classic American landscapes. In the same period, the science of geology evolved rapidly, triggered by the controversy between proponents and opponents of biblical explanations for the origin of rocks. Lavishly illustrated, featuring over sixty paintings and prints, this book is a perfect introduction to understanding the relationship of geology and art. It will delight those who appreciate landscape painting, and anyone who has seen the grandeur of East and West Rock.

A profound, important book, a moving personal detective story and an uncovering of secret pasts, set in Europe’s center, the city of bright colors—Lviv, Ukraine, dividing east from west, north from south, in what had been the Austro-Hungarian Empire. A book that explores the development of the world-changing legal concepts of “genocide” and “crimes against humanity” that came about as a result of the unprecedented atrocities of Hitler’s Third Reich. It is also a spellbinding family memoir, as the author traces the mysterious story of his grandfather as he maneuvered through Europe in the face of Nazi atrocities. This is “a monumental achievement ... told with love, anger and precision” (John le Carré, acclaimed internationally bestselling author). East West Street looks at the personal and intellectual evolution of the two men who simultaneously originated the ideas of “genocide” and “crimes against humanity,” both of whom, not knowing the other, studied at the same university with the same professors, in “the Paris of Ukraine,” a major cultural center of Europe, a city variously called Lemberg, Lwów, Lvov, or Lviv. Phillipe Sands changes the way we look at the world, at our understanding of history and how civilization has tried to cope with mass murder

In East and West Guénon diagnoses the fundamental 'abnormality' of Western civilization vis-à-vis the traditional civilizations of the East, suggests avenues by which the West might be 're-oriented' toward the fundamental metaphysical principles it has largely abandoned, and outlines the possible role of a restoration of true intellectuality in this task. Of course, East and West are no longer what they were in Guenon's time. The aggressive rationalism and materialism of post-Christian Western culture has become a worldwide phenomenon, and no longer corrodes the philosophical and cultural underpinnings of the West only: it has infiltrated distorted forms of Eastern spirituality and metaphysics, incited fundamentalist reactions the world over, and, thanks to the pervasive internet, wields previously unheard of influence. And so today we have an East largely inflamed with a desire to surpass the West in materialism, and a West sodden with moral and spiritual degeneracy. Nonetheless, fruitful exchanges between traditional Christianity and Eastern religions have also taken place on an unprecedented scale, though marred by an ongoing temptation to ill-informed syncretism. In such a milieu, Guénon's East and West, read with an eye to events of recent decades, delivers a stunning intellectual punch. But the East is always the East: the place where the sun rises, the point of recollection and return to the Source. And the West is always the West: the place of the full manifestation of possibilities (including the most degenerate), of the tendency to dissipation and dissolution; the point where the sun sets. In postmodern, global culture, we are all more or less forced to be 'Westerners' outwardly; our only recourse under these circumstances may be to become 'Easterners' within.

When a sudden storm destroys Charles' ship and he is presumed dead, Rose believes something sinister is at work and she sets off on a perilous journey, with the fate of the entire world at stake.

With this book we see a philosopher well steeped in the Western tradition thinking through ancient Eastern disciplines, meditating on what it means to learn to breathe, and urging us all at the dawn of a new century to rediscover indigenous Asian cultures. Yogic tradition, according to Irigaray, can provide an invaluable means for restoring the vital link between the present and eternity—and for re-envisioning the patriarchal traditions of the West. Western, logocentric rationality tends to abstract the teachings of yoga from its everyday practice—most importantly, from the cultivation of breath. Lacking actual, personal experience with yoga or other Eastern spiritual practices, the Western philosophers who have tried to address Hindu and Buddhist teachings—particularly Schopenhauer—have frequently gone astray. Not so, Luce Irigaray. Incorporating her personal experience with yoga into her provocative philosophical thinking on sexual difference, Irigaray proposes a new way of understanding individuation and community in the contemporary world. She looks toward the indigenous, pre-Aryan cultures of India—which, she argues, have maintained an essentially creative ethic of sexual difference predicated on a respect for life, nature, and the feminine. Irigaray's focus on breath in this book is a natural outgrowth of the attention that she has given in previous books to the elements—air, water, and fire. By returning to fundamental human experiences—breathing and the fact of sexual difference—she finds a way out of the endless sociologizing abstractions of much contemporary thought to rethink questions of race, ethnicity, and globalization.

This is a collection of writings about the spiritual meeting of East and West in the modern world including articles by the Dalai Lama, Huston Smith, Frithjof Schuon, Thomas Merton, Titus Burckhardt, Ananda Coomaraswamy, Diana Eck, Gary Snyder and Aldous Huxley. Highlighting aspects of Hinduism, Buddhism, and Taoism that have proved most attractive to Western seekers, it explores the similarities and differences between Eastern and Western traditions while emphasizing respect amongst the adherents of different faiths.

This volume offers arguments from eastern and western philosophical traditions to enrich and diversify our present conceptions of knowledge. The contributors extend contemporary Western epistemology in novel directions, through investigating and questioning entrenched conceptions of knowledge. The cross-tradition engagement with the neurosciences, psychology, and anthropological studies is an important feature of the volume’s methodological approach that helps broaden our epistemological horizons. It presents a collection of perspectives on epistemic agency by engaging philosophical traditions east and west, including Japanese, Buddhist, Confucian, Daoist, and Anglo-analytic.

Melegh's work offers a powerful analysis of the sociological and symbolic meanings of East-West in Europe after the end of the Cold War. While the fundamental poles of East and West remain, both their meaning and their relationship to one another have shifted profoundly since the late 1970s. Melegh exposes the underbelly of liberal characterizations of East-West, highlighting the polarizing effect of extreme nationalism and ethnic racism. The theoretical underpinnings of this work involve the ideas of preeminent theorists such as Karl Mannheim, Michel Foucault and more recently Maria Todorova and Iver Neumann. This work casts into fine relief how the "East-West Slope" oriented negatively from West to East has emerged from liberal characterizations of this project. The book analyzes the historical change in East-West discourses from a modernizationist type to a new/old civilizational one. In addition, this is one of the first attempts to link post-colonial analysis to developments in Eastern Europe.

Two giant, imposing dragons confront their greatest fears…each other! East Dragon and West Dragon live on opposite sides of the world. They have never met—and they like it that way. East Dragon is sure that West Dragon’s huge wings mean that he is very, very strong. West Dragon fears that East Dragon’s long, swishy tail means that he is very, very fierce. But when some meddlesome knights start a riff between their two kingdoms, East Dragon and West Dragon are finally forced to come face-to-fire-breathing-face. Might the two dragons finally discover they aren’t so different after all? Detail-rich illustrations combine with a lighthearted, inspiring message to create a playful twist on the classic theme of fierce, fearless dragons. This story of friendship across cultures begs to be read again and again!