The Divine Travel Agency

Frank Corso runs his own Wall Street research consultancy and has an unusual ability to make friends. A forty year old bachelor living in New York, he is getting increasingly comfortable to a high-life marked by eroding moral virtue. On a business trip to visit a New Orleans based company, he gets more than he bargained for. In the weeks before Christmas of 2004, he is recruited by his ex-girlfriend to find her friend, a young mystic, who has disappeared. New Orleans is a city in Transition. The economy has been improving post the dot com crash, and local government and business leaders are leveraging the city’s crown jewel, The French Quarter. The haven for tourists also has a dark side. The city is marred by political corruption and violence. In 2004, it has the distinction of being the murder capital of the United States. Corso soon finds The Big Easy culture known for its architecture, food and music, filled with a rich marinade of diverse and unusual characters. Befriending people with deep roots in the shallow clays of the Mississippi River, his life is about to change course. He is about to discover the secrets of...The Divine Travel Agency.

"Madness can afford the individual certain resources and abilities that are not available to others. The fantasy life, free flight of ideas, distortions of reality, and heightened senses . . . offer a unique perspective on the world." —From the Introduction Why do some extraordinary individuals overcome mental anguish and produce brilliant creative artistry that is often enhanced by their madness? New York Times best-selling author and noted psychologist Jeffrey Kottler explores this fascinating question in Divine Madness. His book is filled with the compelling stories of emotional turmoil that many great artists have undergone as they struggle for success and survival. Jeffrey Kottler writes about the dramatic and tragic lives of cultural icons Sylvia Plath, Judy Garland, Mark Rothko, Ernest Hemingway, Virginia Woolf, Charles Mingus, Vaslav Nijinsky, Marilyn Monroe, Lenny Bruce, and Brian Wilson. In this riveting book, Kottler highlights the personal story of each of these extraordinary individuals and analyzes how they struggled to overcome their emotional hardships. Divine Madness clearly differentiates between those who surrendered to their illness, often taking their own lives, and those who managed to endure and even recover. Kottler details how their profound psychological issues affected their lives and work, their great productivity and success, and how they strove to achieve some kind of personal stability. The fascinating and brilliantly told stories in Divine Madness help us to find meaning in the incredible lives of these artists. They also serve as an inspiration for those who are grappling to rise above their own challenges and limitations and express themselves more productively and creatively.

Now a new series on Peacock with Rainn Wilson, THE GEOGRAPHY OF BLISS is part travel memoir, part humor, and part twisted self-help guide that takes the viewer across the globe to investigate not what happiness is, but WHERE it is. Are people in Switzerland happier because it is the most democratic country in the world? Do citizens of Qatar, awash in petrodollars, find joy in all that cash? Is the King of Bhutan a visionary for his initiative to calculate Gross National Happiness? Why is Asheville, North Carolina so damn happy? In a unique mix of travel, psychology, science and humor, Eric Weiner answers those questions and many others, offering travelers of all moods some interesting new ideas for sunnier destinations and dispositions.

On a field trip to Hong Kong, the Wall Street field analyst is spun into motion on a course that could change the balance of world power. Highly influenced by the powers of suggestion, Corso must use his unique skills to move through a complex web of triads, assassins, and evil political agendas that plot a course for the equivalent of a single world order. Summoning the Art of War and Kung Fu, he must uncover the axis of rotation around which the script he has written himself into revolves. He must find...The Yellow Agent from Hong Kong.

What if you were to discover that you were only one half of a whole—that you had a divine double? In the second and third centuries CE, Charles Stang shows, this idea gripped the religious imagination of the Eastern Mediterranean, offering a distinctive understanding of the self that has survived in various forms down to the present.

From the globe-trotting of Odysseus to the wanderings of Forrest Gump, travel has provided opportunity for personal growth, change, and development. In this fascinating and inspiring book, psychologist Jeffrey Kottler explains why adventuresome travel is good for your soul, your mental health and explores the deeper meaning of "getting away" from it all.

How can we use the experience of darkness to lift our spirits, challenge our hearts and minds and draw us closer into the heart of God?

"A sophisticated, deeply informed account of real life in the real CIA that adds immeasurably to the public understanding of the espionage culture—the good and the bad." —Bob Woodward Jack Devine ran Charlie Wilson's War in Afghanistan. It was the largest covert action of the Cold War, and it was Devine who put the brand-new Stinger missile into the hands of the mujahideen during their war with the Soviets, paving the way to a decisive victory against the Russians. He also pushed the CIA's effort to run down the narcotics trafficker Pablo Escobar in Colombia. He tried to warn the director of central intelligence, George Tenet, that there was a bullet coming from Iraq with his name on it. He was in Chile when Allende fell, and he had too much to do with Iran-Contra for his own taste, though he tried to stop it. And he tangled with Rick Ames, the KGB spy inside the CIA, and hunted Robert Hanssen, the mole in the FBI. Good Hunting: An American Spymaster's Story is the spellbinding memoir of Devine's time in the Central Intelligence Agency, where he served for more than thirty years, rising to become the acting deputy director of operations, responsible for all of the CIA's spying operations. This is a story of intrigue and high-stakes maneuvering, all the more gripping when the fate of our geopolitical order hangs in the balance. But this book also sounds a warning to our nation's decision makers: covert operations, not costly and devastating full-scale interventions, are the best safeguard of America's interests worldwide. Part memoir, part historical redress, Good Hunting debunks outright some of the myths surrounding the Agency and cautions against its misuses. Beneath the exotic allure—living abroad with his wife and six children, running operations in seven countries, and serving successive presidents from Nixon to Clinton—this is a realist, gimlet-eyed account of the Agency. Now, as Devine sees it, the CIA is trapped within a larger bureaucracy, losing swaths of turf to the military, and, most ominous of all, is becoming overly weighted toward paramilitary operations after a decade of war. Its capacity to do what it does best—spying and covert action—has been seriously degraded. Good Hunting sheds light on some of the CIA's deepest secrets and spans an illustrious tenure—and never before has an acting deputy director of operations come forth with such an account. With the historical acumen of Steve Coll's Ghost Wars and gripping scenarios that evoke the novels of John le Carré even as they hew closely to the facts on the ground, Devine offers a master class in spycraft.

People have reported encounters with God since the beginning of recorded history. Visitations gave rise to every major religion, influencing the hearts and minds of billions of believers. These powerful events are part of the human record, but it is unclear how accurate they are or how frequently they occur. However, reports from those who claim to have encountered Divinity are fairly consistent: There’s something unfathomable out there. Al Guart, a committed agnostic, diminished these accounts as possibly the result of overactive imaginations, mental illness, mythology or drugs – until the first of his unexpected encounters in 1980. He kept silent about his experiences over the past forty years, working to integrate them into daily life while trying to fathom how and why they happened. In this ground-breaking book, Al relives two Divine encounters in stark, journalistic detail. The first Visitation overwhelmed him with sheer jubilance, and the second – also imbued with joy – left him weeping as never before. Along the way, he takes a hard look at historical accounts of Divine appearances and challenges the renderings of God left in their wake. He offers the fruits of his spiritual inquiries for consideration but encourages readers to seek their own direct contact with the Creator - and to settle for nothing less.

Why do so many people care so much about celebrities? Who decides who gets to be a star? What are the privileges and pleasures of fandom? Do celebrities ever deserve the outsized attention they receive? In this fascinating and deeply researched book, Sharon Marcus challenges everything you thought you knew about our obsession with fame. Icons are not merely famous for being famous; the media alone cannot make or break stars; fans are not simply passive dupes. Instead, journalists, the public, and celebrities themselves all compete, passionately and expertly, to shape the stories we tell about celebrities and fans. The result: a high-stakes drama as endless as it is unpredictable. Drawing on scrapbooks, personal diaries, and vintage fan mail, Marcus traces celebrity culture back to its nineteenth-century roots, when people the world over found themselves captivated by celebrity chefs, bad-boy poets, and actors such as the "divine" Sarah Bernhardt (1844-1923), as famous in her day as the Beatles in theirs. Known in her youth for sleeping in a coffin, hailed in maturity as a woman of genius, Bernhardt became a global superstar thanks to savvy engagement with her era's most innovative media and technologies: the popular press, commercial photography, and speedy new forms of travel. Whether you love celebrity culture or hate it, The Drama of Celebrity will change how you think about one of the most important phenomena of modern times.