**A TLS BOOK OF THE YEAR SELECTION** As heard on The Tim Ferriss Show! 'Captivating' TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT 'The book Shukman was born to write' NATALIE GOLDBERG, author of WRITING DOWN THE BONES 'A wonderful and generous book' DAVID HINTON, author of THE WILDS OF POETRY *** One Blade of Grass is award-winning novelist and poet Henry Shukman's account of his journey through the world of Zen Buddhism. Raised in a rationalist household in Oxford during the spiritual heyday of the Sixties and Seventies, an unexpected spiritual awakening would prompt a lifelong quest to integrate the experience into his life, leading him eventually to Zen Buddhism. As Shukman gets to grips with meditative practice and struggles with anxiety, depression and the chronic eczema he had had since childhoods, he discovers in surprising ways the emotional, spiritual and even physical healing that he has been searching for all along. By turns humorous and moving, this beautifully written memoir demystifies Zen training, casting its profound insights in simple, lucid language, and takes the reader on a journey of their own, into the hidden treasures of life that contemplative practice can reveal to any of us.

Rabbi Alan Lew is known as the Zen Rabbi, a man who has been a leader in the Jewish meditation movement and who has worked to bring two ancient religious traditions into everyday life. One God Clapping is the story of his roundabout yet continuously provoking spiritual odyssey. It is also the story of the meeting between East and West in America and the ways in which that encounter has transformed how we understand our God and ourselves. Born in Brooklyn, where his grandfathers introduce him to the rituals of Jewish life, Lew is uprooted when his family moves to the suburbs. From there, his quest for spiritual solace begins, seeing him through the flowering of the sixties in California where, in the company of poets, hipsters, and beats, he settles on Zen Buddhism as a spiritual path. The enhanced self-awareness he chronicles leads to a completely unexpected revelation - the depth of his attachment to being a Jew. His interest in Buddhism begins to wane, culminating in his decision to become a rabbi. Yet even upon settling in as rabbi of the largest conservative synagogue in San Francisco, he is not at the end of his search for a spiritual home. Forced to answer questions about his Buddhist past, he is obliged to examine more closely the nature of spiritual practice and determine exactly what Buddhism and Judaism have to offer each other. Like a Zen parable or a Jewish folk tale, One God Clapping unfolds as a series of stories, each containing a moment of revelation or instruction that, while often unexpected, is never simple of contrived. Like the life of Alan Lew himself, this book is a bold experiment in the integration of Eastern and Western ways of looking at and living in the world.

The guiding metaphor in Coyote's new spiritual biography is drawn from a line in an early Bob Dylan song, and has become the tale of a young man caught between apparently antipodal options and the journey that leads to wealth and power. Coyote provides readers intimate portraits of mentors that shaped him, as what begins as a peripatetic flirtation with Zen deepens into a life-long avocation, ordination as a priest, and finally the road to Transmission-- acknowledgment from his teacher that he is ready to be an independent teacher.