NEW ARRIVALS

The Book of Joy: Lasting Happiness in a Changing World

AUTHOR : Dalai Lama, Desmond Tutu, Douglas Carlton Abrams

PUBLISHER : Avery

GENRE : Self-Help

Two spiritual giants.

Five days.

One timeless question.

Nobel Peace Prize Laureates His Holiness the Dalai Lama and Archbishop Desmond Tutu have survived more than 50 years of exile and the soul-crushing violence of oppression. Despite their hardships - or, as they would say, because of them - they are two of the most joyful people on the planet.

In April 2015, Archbishop Tutu traveled to the Dalai Lama’s home in Dharamsala, India, to celebrate His Holiness’s 80th birthday and to create what they hoped would be a gift for others. They looked back on their long lives to answer a single burning question: How do we find joy in the face of life’s inevitable suffering?

They traded intimate stories, teased each other continually, and shared their spiritual practices. By the end of a week filled with laughter and punctuated with tears, these two global heroes had stared into the abyss and despair of our time and revealed how to live a life brimming with joy.

The Archbishop has never claimed sainthood, and the Dalai Lama considers himself a simple monk. In this unique collaboration, they offer us the reflection of real lives filled with pain and turmoil in the midst of which they have been able to discover a level of peace, of courage, and of joy to which we can all aspire in our own lives.

Year Between Friends: 3191 Miles Apart

AUTHOR : Maria Alexandra Vettese, Stephanie Congdon Barnes

PUBLISHER : Harry N. Abrams

GENRE : Arts & Photography

An exploration of 365 days of shared experiences between two friends on opposite sides of the country, inspired by their blog, 3191 Miles Apart.

Maria Alexandra Vettese and Stephanie Congdon Barnes share a love of art and design, handmade pleasures and a well-lived domestic life. Almost a decade ago, they began their first yearlong project together, posting a photo from each of their mornings on their blog, 3191 Miles Apart, named for the distance between their homes in Portland, Maine, and Portland, Oregon.

“A Year Between Friends” celebrates their most recent project together - a visual representation of 2015, month-by-month, side-by-side, but miles apart. In addition to 400 photographs recording their daily inspirations and creative undertakings and a foreword from New York Times bestselling author Molly Wizenberg, this unique collaboration expands on their prior work with over 25 handmade crafts and seasonal recipes, notes on simple living, and personal stories.

It is an intimate joint portrait revealed through photographic snippets - mending a sweater, making a mobile from a cherished collection, creating fabric dyes from natural materials, baking scones - that defies distance through the celebration of shared moments of calmness, warmth, and family.

Both aspirational and down-to-earth, “A Year Between Friends” is an inspiring visual love letter to friendship and creativity, a reminder to appreciate life one day at a time, to cherish simplicity, and to make the extra effort to do things with care.

The New Koreans: The Business, History and People of South Korea

AUTHOR : Mr Michael Breen

PUBLISHER : Thomas Dunne Books

GENRE : History

In the course of a couple of generations, South Koreans took themselves out of the paddy fields and into Silicon Valley, establishing themselves as a democracy alongside the advanced countries of the world. Yet for all their ambition and achievement, the new Koreans are a curiously self-deprecating people.

Theirs is a land with a rich and complex past, certain aspects of which they would prefer to forget as they focus on the future.

Having lived and worked in South Korea for many years, Michael Breen considers what drives the nation today, and where it is heading. Through insightful anecdotes and observations, he provides a compelling portrait of Asia’s most contradictory and polarized country.

South Koreans are motivated by defiance, Breen argues: defiance of their antagonistic neighbor, North Korea, of their own history and of international opinion. Here is an overlooked nation with great drive that determined to succeed on its own terms.