Books by Category - Travel

Browse by Category - Travel

City of Lingering Splendor

In his early twenties, John Blofeld spent what he describes as "three exquisitely happy years" in Peking during the era of the last emperor, when the breathtaking greatness of China's ancient traditions was still everywhere evident. Arriving in 1934, he found a city imbued with the atmosphere of the recent imperial past and haunted by the powerful spirit of the late Dowager Empress Tzu Hsi. He entered a world of magnificent palaces and temples of the Forbidden City, of lotus-covered lakes and lush pleasure-gardens, of bustling bazaars and peaceful bathhouses, and of "flower houses" with their beautiful young courtesans versed in the arts of pleasing men. With a novelists' command of detail and dialogue, Blofeld vividly re-creates the magic of these years and conveys to the reader his appreciation and nostalgia for a way of life long vanished.

City of Lingering Splendor

Hard Travel to Sacred Places

Hard Travel to Sacred Places is the record of a personal odyssey through Southeast Asia, an external and internal journey through grief and the painful realities of a decadent age. Wurlitzer—novelist, screenwriter, and Buddhist practitioner—travels with his wife, photographer Lynn Davis, on a photo assignment to the sacred sites of Thailand, Burma, and Cambodia. Heavy Westernization, sex clubs, aging hippies and expatriates, and political dissidents provide a vivid contrast to the peace that Wurlitzer and Davis seek, still reeling from the death of their son in a car accident. As Davis with her camera searches for a thread of meaning among the artifacts and relics of a more enlightened age, Wurlitzer grasps at the wisdom of the Buddhist teachings in an effort to assuage his grief. His journal chronicles the survival of age-old truths in a world gone mad. 

Hard Travel to Sacred Places

Samadhi

A spiritual life is a creative process, a path of devotion, and a journey of self-discovery. Photographer Derek Biermann traveled to northern India to obtain what became a rare and privileged insight into the sacred lives of devotees following different spiritual paths. He asked each of these individuals the same questions:

With their blessing, the answers to these questions were recorded and transcribed and are presented here as a unique insight into the process of obtaining samadhi—the direct experience of the conscious Self. Samadhi is described as the deepest level of meditation in which the mind becomes completely absorbed in the uninterrupted contemplation of reality and ceases to function other than as pure consciousness.

Each response is accompanied by a superb portrait photograph, taken by Biermann, which documents a special exchange of spiritual perspectives. What intrinsically binds all of these people together is their faith. Their knowledge and wisdom guide us toward a further understanding of the depths of spirituality in India.

Samadhi

Return to Category List