Here are 100 books that The Bird and the Fish fans have personally recommended if you like
The Bird and the Fish.
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My passion is writing about ordinary people doing extraordinary things, rather than famous people or people with some unusual skill, like being a math genius or something. This passion led me to Anna Merz’s story and my growing appreciation of the power of the animal/human connection and how much communication can take place without language.
Okay, I confess this is the same story as the recommendation above, The Elephants Come Home, but this is written by the actual guy, Lawrence Anthony, who undertook this effort.
Also, instead of a picture book, it is a 380-page tale told by the person who lived it. If you love The Elephants Come Home, you’ll want to read Elephant Whisperer as well.
I found myself exclaiming again and again over the stories that Anthony tells of life on the sanctuary.
When South African conservationist Lawrence Anthony was asked to accept a herd of "rogue" wild elephants on his Thula Thula game reserve in Zululand, his common sense told him to refuse. But he was the herd's last chance of survival: they would be killed if he wouldn't take them. In order to save their lives, Anthony took them in. In the years that followed he became a part of their family. And as he battled to create a bond with the elephants, he came to realize that they had a great deal to teach him about life, loyalty, and freedom.…
I firmly believe we each have a unique story to tell, to record in order to help others and to record a history. I love the ordinary person who lives an extraordinary life. So many people don’t realize how wonderful they are. It is also cathartic to write your story, in doing so you forgive others as you forgive yourself for decisions poorly made.
Stanley Tucci makes this book personal. He connects to any reader that loves the world of cooking and entertaining friends at his table and who loves to travel, too. He takes the reader into his personal life, not just memories of his good times, but his errors, too. He’s honest. He’s intriguing, letting you know who he truly is. He loves his life, all of it, and he passes that love onto you.
A Guardian book of the year A Times book of the year A Daily Mail book of the year
From award-winning actor and food obsessive Stanley Tucci comes an intimate and charming memoir of life in and out of the kitchen. For Stanley and foodie fans, this is the perfect, irresistible gift.
'It's impossible to read this without becoming ravenous!' -- Nigella Lawson
'It is as infectious as it is delicious, as funny as it is insightful. The only reason to put this book down, is to go cook and eat from it' -- Heston…
I firmly believe we each have a unique story to tell, to record in order to help others and to record a history. I love the ordinary person who lives an extraordinary life. So many people don’t realize how wonderful they are. It is also cathartic to write your story, in doing so you forgive others as you forgive yourself for decisions poorly made.
Martin’s snaps are words from the life she lived growing up on a Bracey, Virginia farm to Virginia Beach to Manhattan, New York to time spent across country, around the world, and back to holding events in the Dairy Barn on the farm. Her adventures in the big cities as a literary agent and executive producer for television are balanced between recipes from her passion for cooking for friends.
Dreams play a major role as she executive produces the series The Power of Dreams for the Discovery Channel, interviewing names that every household recognizes.
Martin is a woman who has lived a fascinating life by making things happen, by following her intuition, listening to her dreams, and doesn’t mind talking about it. This is a fabulous read that will inspire others to go ahead, step out, and take a chance on life. I love this book!
Author Sandra Martin shares these stories which are fundamentally about the bones of her life; the structure from which she has built her life; her goals, her spiritual search, and her career.
Praise for Snapshots: Memories and Recipes
“Sandra Martin’s collection of vignettes from her remarkable life feels like the sun – whole worlds have revolved around her in a perfectly natural way. Riveting, engrossing, and delightful.” Dean Radin, Ph.D., Chief Scientist at the Institute of Noetic Sciences (IONS)
Have you ever taken your deep, vague spiritual yearnings to the bookstore aisle and found one volume of wisdom that spoke…
I firmly believe we each have a unique story to tell, to record in order to help others and to record a history. I love the ordinary person who lives an extraordinary life. So many people don’t realize how wonderful they are. It is also cathartic to write your story, in doing so you forgive others as you forgive yourself for decisions poorly made.
This fascinating memoir, written in journal style of all the highly unusual, paranormal incidents that have happened to the author from the time he was a youngster. It is a chronicle of the many supernatural events experienced by one ordinary man, a former deputy sheriff. Time after time, a divine power intervenes to heal and save him, leaving him a stunned witness to his own salvation. This unusual story reaffirms my faith in the unseen and the 6th sense not everyone has.
Richard Foltz is a cultural historian specializing in the broader Iranian world. He holds a Ph.D. in Middle Eastern History from Harvard University and has published eleven books and over one hundred articles on topics ranging from animal rights to Zoroastrianism. He is currently Professor in the Department of Religions and Cultures at Concordia University in Montréal, Canada.
An engagingly written, fair and balanced history for readers interested in more detail and analysis than is found in my own slim introductory volume. In my view the single best scholarly history of Iran ever written.
Iran is a land of contradictions. It is an Islamic republic, but one in which only 1.4 percent of the population attend Friday prayers. Iran's religious culture encompasses the most censorious and dogmatic Shi'a Muslim clerics in the world, yet its poetry insistently dwells on the joys of life: wine, beauty, sex. Iranian women are subject to one of the most restrictive dress codes in the Islamic world, but make up nearly 60 percent of the student population of the nation's universities. In A History of Iran, acclaimed historian Michael Axworthy chronicles the rich history of this complex nation from…
I've always been fascinated with the idea that humans have so many layers of consciousness, and reality is multi-faceted. I've studied Zen Buddhism, yoga, and for the past 43 years, Sufism. My experience of life has developed into a journey of changing difficult situations into exhilarating discoveries, finding hidden patterns in nature that delight me and tell me I’m not alone in the universe, and helping many people transform into beings of joy and gratitude. I’m beginning to see that our transformation delights and changes the Divine; we are not a passing phenomenon but contributors to new creation on a major scale.
This book comes to our rescue for those of us who wish to delve more deeply into the work of Henry Corbin. Cheetham helped me see that my practices cleared my heart so that inner visions would appear in their essential nature His words guided me to integrate difficult themes such as levels of being or lists of angels such that I could incorporate them into my heart.
The first book in English to synthesize the remarkable work of Henry Corbin, the great French philosopher, Christian theologian, and scholar of Islamic mysticism. Corbin, a colleague of C. G. Jung’s at Eranos, and one the most important visionaries of the twentieth century, had a seminal influence on the development of archetypal psychology, especially through the idea of the “imaginal world.” Corbin’s work bridges the gap between the philosophy and theology of the West and the mysticism of Islam and provides a radical and unified vision of the three great monotheistic religions based upon the Creative Imagination. One obstacle for…
I chose to study creative nonfiction during my MFA program so I could learn what makes great memoirs work, but I first fell in love with the genre as a teenager, when I picked up Angela’s Ashes off my mom’s bedside table. I’m grateful for the way memoir gives me a window into the lives of people of other races, religions, abilities, experiences, and even other centuries.While my book The Place We Make isn’t only a memoir—it’s a blend of memoir and historical biography—it was my desire to both understand the view through my research subject’s eyes, and analyze how I was seeing the world myself, that drove me to write it.
Persepolis is the book that made me fall in love with graphic memoirs.
I’ve typically been more of a word person than a picture person, but Satrapi’s stark black-and-white images make such creative use of the space on the page that I was converted. I learned so much about the history of Iranian conflict from this book—through the young girl eyes of its narrator—but my favorite part is the way Satrapi visually depicts her conversations with God.
After I read this book, I started drawing images of my conversations with God into my own prayer journal.
Wise, often funny, sometimes heart-breaking, Persepolis tells the story of Marjane Satrapi's life in Tehran from the ages of six to fourteen, growing up during the Iranian Revolution.
The intelligent and outspoken child of radical Marxists, and the great-grandaughter of Iran's last emperor, Satrapi bears witness to a childhood uniquely entwined with the history of her country. Persepolis paints an unforgettable portrait of daily life in Iran and of the bewildering contradictions between home life and public life.
Amidst the tragedy, Marjane's child's eye view adds immediacy and humour, and her story of a childhood at once outrageous and ordinary,…
As a religious person, I’ve always believed religion is a force for good while being constantly reminded of the horrors it causes. This became a real-world concern with the 9/11 attacks (which happened my second week in college) and the faith-tinged US response. I spent ten years in Washington, DC working at the intersection of faith and counterterrorism, hopeful religion could solve our problems but worried it will only make things worse. I’ve continued that work as a Professor at the University of Vermont. This book reflects that tension and my desire to resolve it.
This book focuses on Iran, but like the Niebuhr book has broader applications.
Tabaar is an expert on Iranian politics who conducted incredibly in-depth research on Islamic politics in the country before and after its revolution in 1979. He pushes back on the simplistic idea that religious ideas drove politics in Iran; instead, a “politics of Islam” dominated,” in which actors drew on Islamic symbols and practices to advance their political goals.
Tabaar’s book gives a compelling example of the way religion can both drive politics and be caught up in political actors’ strategic calculations, leading to unexpected effects. It provided a foundation for my book’s argument that religion is both an influence on and tool of foreign policy that rarely works out the way it was intended.
Since the 1979 revolution, scholars and policy makers alike have tended to see Iranian political actors as religiously driven-dedicated to overturning the international order in line with a theologically prescribed outlook. In Religious Statecraft, Mohammad Ayatollahi Tabaar argues that such views have the link between religious ideology and political order backwards. This provocative book examines the politics of Islam rather than political Islam-demonstrating that religious narratives can change rapidly, frequently, and dramatically in accordance with elites' threat perceptions. Tabaar traces half a century of shifting Islamist doctrines against the backdrop of Iran's factional and international politics. He argues that the…
I've always been fascinated with the idea that humans have so many layers of consciousness, and reality is multi-faceted. I've studied Zen Buddhism, yoga, and for the past 43 years, Sufism. My experience of life has developed into a journey of changing difficult situations into exhilarating discoveries, finding hidden patterns in nature that delight me and tell me I’m not alone in the universe, and helping many people transform into beings of joy and gratitude. I’m beginning to see that our transformation delights and changes the Divine; we are not a passing phenomenon but contributors to new creation on a major scale.
This book, for serious students of mysticism, dances between the worlds of Persia a thousand years ago and the present. For me, it took the topic of creative imagination out of the realm of fantasy and established it as a cornerstone of the way we perceive and give meaning to reality, and the way we connect to God and inner worlds.
"Henry Corbin's works are the best guide to the visionary tradition...Corbin, like Scholem and Jonas, is remembered as a scholar of genius. He was uniquely equipped not only to recover Iranian Sufism for the West, but also to defend the principal Western traditions of esoteric spirituality."--From the introduction by Harold Bloom Ibn 'Arabi (1165-1240) was one of the great mystics of all time. Through the richness of his personal experience and the constructive power of his intellect, he made a unique contribution to Shi'ite Sufism. In this book, which features a powerful new preface by Harold Bloom, Henry Corbin brings…
Lois Pryce is a British author who has travelled extensively in Iran. Her book, Revolutionary Ride tells the story of her 2013 solo motorcycle tour of the country and was shortlisted for the Edward Stanford ‘Adventure Book of the Year’ Award. Her travels have taken her to over fifty countries and her writing has featured in The New York Times, The Guardian, CNN, BBC, The Telegraph and The Independent.
British-Iranian journalist, Ramita Navai shines a spotlight on 21st century Tehran that we rarely see in the mainstream press, delving into the city’s youth culture, illicit entertainment, and seedy underbelly of drugs and despair. City of Lies exposes the reality of how young, modern Iranians really live - constantly evading the authorities to seek out the pleasures they are denied under the regime.
Absorbing and unforgettable, City of Lies travels up and down Vali Asr Street in today's Tehran, where the most ordinary Iranians are forced to live extraordinary lives. Ramita Navai paints an intimate portrait of the city's recesses where intrigues abound. Survival depends on an intricate network of falsehoods, and the difference between modesty and profanity, loyalty and betrayal, honor and disgrace is often no more than the believability of a lie.
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