by Robert Alstead

Zen: The Supreme Experience,
The Newly Discovered Scripts
by Alan Watts, edited by Mark Watts
"The forefather of all Western Zen teachers" Alan Watts (1915-1973) was born in England, trained as a Christian priest, and after resigning from the Church in 1950, pursued a lifelong study of Eastern philosophies. Renowned for his lucidity and humour, Watts became highly influential in bringing the ideas on the philosophy and psychology of religion, Hinduism, Buddhism, Taoism and Zen to Western audiences, publishing twenty books, numerous articles, and giving many lectures and radio talks. Zen: The Supreme Experience brings together a series of edited transcripts of his talks in a lavishly illustrated book. With its double-page colour photographs and Taoist nuggets of wisdom quotations on each page ("The best way to run the world is to let it take its course - and get yourself out of the way of it!") this would be at home on the coffee table. However, it invites deeper reading, and followers of Watts will be interested in those chapters that were transcribed and edited from recordings from a series of talks given in New York after he wrote The Way of Zen in 1958, recordings which, the foreword says, "lay in a closet for forty years, untouched and all but forgotten." Watts’s son Mark who edited this volume offers a personal remembrance of his father.
Vega, 2003, $29.95.


Encyclopedia of British Columbia
Edited by Daniel Francis
This being the age of the internet and the Google search, large tomes like the Encyclopedia of British Columbia have an uncertain future. But then this reference for things British Columbian is not just a book, but also comes with a CD-Rom and a web site (www.knowbc.com). The book version, follows a classic layout with alphabetically organized entries and a plentiful supply of photographs, ranging from pioneer photographs from the archives to contemporary shots of wildlife and the great outdoors. Charts, graphs, maps, sketches and illustrations offer welcome accompanying visuals to the potted entries on everything from Asahi (the highly successful Vancouver Japanese baseball team of the pre-war years) to X-Files (the television series).
Harbour Publishing, 2000, $70


Palmistry: A Beginner’s Guide
by Sasha Fenton
"Looking at a hand is a lot like reading a map" asserts this palmistry primer. If you are looking for an explanation of why our hands reveal so much about us, perhaps with some scientific theory to back it up, then this is not that book. A Beginner’s Guide is very much a practical guide for understanding the lines, crosses, bumps, mounts, and squiggles that crowd our palms. As you would expect of such a book, there are plenty of illustrations that will help you avoid confusing your heart line with your head line, or your mount of Venus with your mount of Jupiter. Fenton is clearly knowledgeable in the ancient art and the chatty style draws you in.
Sterling Publishing Company, 2002, $22.95


Getting in the Gap
(with meditation CD)
by Dr Wayne W. Dyer
What is the gap? "The gap is an exquisite place! It’s a place where miracles occur," enthuses Dr. Wayne Dyer at the beginning of this small hardback on meditation and finding inner peace. Dyer calls the gap a place where our thoughts cease, "the silence between the notes." His little book and CD offers some testimonies, musings, lessons and ideas for finding that space in busy lives, focusing in particular on Japa meditation (Japa means "to say the name of God repeatedly").
Hay House, 2003, $26.95




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