Kirjahaku

"Shoes Outside the Door is a not only a fine history of the San Francisco Zen Center and Zen in the United States, it is a cautionary tale, valuable to anyone embarked on a spiritual practice." --San Jose Mercury News. Eastern tradition collides with Western individualism in this provocative and compulsively readable investigation of Buddhism, American-style. A genuine spiritual movement becomes strangely entangled with elitist aesthetics, the culture of celebrity, multi-million-dollar investment portfolios, sex scandals, and an unsolved crime.Told Rashomon-fashion by a singular mix of hippies, millionaires, intellectuals, and lost souls whose lives are almost unbelievably intertwined, Shoes Outside the Door is the first book to examine the inner workings of the profoundly influential San Francisco Zen Center. In exploring the history of the most important institution in American Buddhism, author Michael Downing provocatively captures the profound ambivalence of people who earnestly seek both inner peace and worldly satisfaction.

Mark Sternum, a professor who teaches spelling and grammar at Boston's McClintock College, is full of droll observations about the rules that govern our language, but he leads a diligent if somewhat detached life. Friends and family try to coax him into deeper involvement, yet he keeps even his lover at arm's length. He screens all incoming calls, including his eccentric sister's "word pictures" about the waning days of their comatose mother.One day, an African-American single mother who has failed the college's basic skills test for the last time accuses Mark of "prejudgism," and Mark is fired. Blown off course, he monitors the ensuing academic skirmish from a distance as his case makes national headlines, and turns his attention instead to the graceful rhythms of a small Shaker community. As the scrambled pieces of Mark's life and the simple ways of the Shakers begin to merge, Mark finds new beauty in his own maddening, blissful dependency on the people in his life.Funny and generous, Downing's seemingly effortless prose juxtaposes cunning portraits of academic functionaries weathering the age of political correctness with the people and values of the last Shaker families in America.

Sam and Ed live the high life, and see no reason to add to their happy twosome. Then 11-year-old Scot's mother dies, and a wine-soaked promise pushes the couple into parenthood. They dutifully make all the usual arrangements, but Scot is far from usual, sporting makeup and enduring bullying at school. Soon Sam and Ed begin to question their parenting, their commitment to each other, and the compromises they've made to live in a straight society. Breakfast with Scot is a humorous, heartwarming novel about the true meaning of family.

Recently widowed, unhappily stuck on a pricey whiplash tour of Italy, Elizabeth Berman comes face to face with the first documented painting of a teardrop in human history, and in the presence of that tearful mother, and the arresting company of the renowned and anonymous women painted by Giotto in the Arena Chapel, she wakes up to the possibility that she is not lost.Mitchell left me everything, just as he promised.  Everything," he liked to say during his last month on the sofa,  everything will be yours," as if it wasn't yet. I was left with that and two adult children who could not tolerate my sitting in my home by myself admittedly, rather too often in a capacious pink flannel nightgown and the green cardigan Mitchell was wearing on the afternoon he died. That's how Elizabeth winds up on a tour better suited to her late-husband, a Dante scholar. Mitchell masterminded the itinerary as a surprise for their thirty-fifth wedding anniversary.Itching to leave as soon as she arrives in Padua, Elizabeth's efforts to book a ticket home are stymied by her aggressively supportive children, the ministrations of an incomprehensibly Italian hotel staff, and the prospect of forfeiting the sizable chunk of cash she shelled out for the trip. But there are consolations arugula pizza and ancient arcades and Aperol spritzes in the piazza with her odd lot of fellow castaways.Instead of deconstructing their disappointing former lives, they are drawn together by their longing to understand how something beautiful is made. They dive headlong into the Arena Chapel, trying to untangle Giotto himself, whose frescoes in Padua secured his reputation as the world's greatest painter. Michael Downing has devised a divine romantic comedy. Tracking the hopes and heartaches and hangovers of a woman with a history of disappearing,The Chapel shows us that happiness is as fragile as a fresco by Giotto.

Welcome to Happy, Texas-a small Panhandle town with a name that doesn't always ring true. Discontent is brewing in Happy as Brother Bob questions his beliefs as pastor of a church. Jen, his choir director, flounders in her unhappy marriage while caring for her mentally ill sister, Cheyenne, and cowboy James struggles between what is right and finally finding true love. When an elder Hispanic member of their community-Joaquin-learns his granddaughter, Angelica, has fallen into the hands of traffickers, this unlikely group of townsfolk unite and embark on an epic journey to save her. Angelica is being held by coyotes-the frightening human kind-across the river from the West Texas town of Presidio on the Mexican border. It will be a miracle if she survives long enough for her grandfather and his Happy crew to rescue her. With poignancy and humor, Land of Dust and Hope deftly illustrates the resilience of the human spirit in its forthright depiction of the experiences of people who are desperately trying to cross the US border and the importance of challenging the traditional notions of love, faith, and sin.

"By means both wry and warm, Michael Downing elucidates the meaning of the classroom--its space for reflection, rumination, and pause--in a world that doesn't seem to be stopping. Still in Love reminds me why he was one of my favorite professors ever." --Melissa Broder, author of The Pisces This is your chance to enroll in English 10 at highly rated Hellman College--if you can find a place to sit in the fantastically overcrowded classroom. Mark Sternum, whom readers first met in Michael Downing's beloved novel Perfect Agreement, is a veteran teacher. Twenty years older, separated for six months from his longtime lover, and desperate to duck the overtures of double-dealing deans above him and disgruntled adjunct faculty below him, Mark has one ambition every day he is on campus--to close the door and leave the world behind. His escape, however, is complicated by his contentious wrestling match of a relationship with the Professor, the tenured faculty member with whom Mark has cotaught this creative-writing workshop for ten years. The spectacle of their combative academic relationship is a chance for students--all of us--to learn what an amazing arena the classroom can be. Replete with engaging writing exercises, harsh criticism, and contrarian advice, Still in Love is the story of one semester. And it is an urgent reminder that we desperately need classrooms, that those singular, sealed-off-from-the-world sanctuaries are where we learn to love our lives.