(View entire post here)

The Dalai Lama arrives in the United States this week to teach and give talks about Tibetan Buddhism.

"Dalai Lama" is a title held by both the spiritual leader and the political leader of the Tibetan people. All Dalai Lamas are believed to be the reincarnation of the Bodhisattva of Compassion. Bodhisattvas are those who have found enlightenment but choose to return to help others.

The current Dalai Lama is the 14^th and is widely known as a symbol of his country, Tibet, which was occupied by China in 1959. While the Tibetan government in exile works to regain control of their country, the Dalai Lama spends most of his time spreading the teachings of Buddhism and sharing its tenets.

His current schedule for US appearances is:

Teachings in Bloomington, IN, USA on May 12 & 13: His Holiness will give two-day teachings on The Heart Sutra (sherab nyingpo) organized by The Tibetan & Mongolian Buddhist Cultural Center. Contact Website: www.tmbcc.net

Lords of Finance: The Bankers Who Broke the World by Liaquat Ahamed, edited by Ann Godoff, President and Publisher of The Penguin Press, has won the Pulitzer Prize "for a distinguished and appropriately documented book on the history of the United States." The 94th annual Pulitzer Prizes in Journalism, Letters, Drama and Music were announced earlier today by Columbia University in New York. The Pulitzer Board praised Lords of Finance as "a compelling account of how four powerful bankers played crucial roles in triggering the Great Depression and ultimately transforming the United States into the world's financial leader."  Each Pulitzer Prize winner is awarded $10,000.

Lords of Finance was a New York Times bestseller in hardcover and paperback, published by The Penguin Press in hardcover in January 2009 and by Penguin Books in paperback in December 2009. Ahamed, a professional investment manager for 25 years, offers a bold, insightful analysis of the world economic collapse of the late 1920s. He reveals that it was, in fact, the decisions taken by a small number of central bankers that were the primary cause of the economic meltdown, the effects of which set the stage for WWII and reverberated for decades to follow.

Other recent Penguin Group (USA) Pulitzer Prize winners include The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Díaz (Riverhead Books, 2008) and March by Geraldine Brooks (Viking/Penguin, 2006) - both in the Fiction category.

 (View entire post here)

The inspiration for The Surrendered has its roots in a project I worked on more than twenty years ago, while I was still in college. I was taking a seminar on modern Korean history, and I decided that I would conduct an interview with my father to fulfill the writing assignment, conceiving a reporter-at-large-type piece that would offer personal testimony and narrative set against a historical backdrop. I wasn’t sure if he would agree. My father was twelve years old on the eve of the Korean War, and although over the years I had asked him a number of times about his experiences, his responses were typically vague and hurried; he never seemed to want to talk about that time, only briefly mentioning that his sister had died during the war from an untreated bout of pneumonia. But since I was taking a course with a special focus on Korea, he agreed to speak in more detail about that period.

My father’s family was originally from Pyongyang, now the capital of North Korea, and they had joined the throngs of refugees who were heading south in an attempt to get behind the line of American forces. He first recounted a story about his favorite older cousin, who was pregnant and just about to give birth as the rest of the extended family was frantically packing up and leaving. My father was dispatched to tell his cousin that everyone was departing—explosions could be heard in the distance—yet even though she and her husband desperately wanted to go, she had already started her labors. She couldn’t be moved. Everybody soon left, and that was last time the cousin and her husband were seen alive; to this day no one knows what happened to them, whether they perished or survived the war and ended up living in North Korea.

Former Vice President Al Gore and the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change were awarded the Nobel Peace Prize today by the Nobel Prize committee. "He is probably the single individual who has done most to create greater worldwide understanding of the measures that need to be adopted," said Ole Danbolt Mjos, chairman of the Nobel committee.

Al Gore's campaign to make the issue of global warming a
recognized problem worldwide was covered in the 2006 documentary, An Inconvenient Truth, which was also released in book form by Viking earlier this year.

In a statement, Gore said he was "deeply honored," adding that "the climate crisis is not a political issue, it is a moral and spiritual challenge to all of humanity."

The former vice president has stated that he will donate his half of the $1.5 million prize to the Alliance for Climate Protection, a U.S. organization he founded that seeks to persuade people to cut emissions and reduce global warming.

The award ceremony will be held on December 10th, in Oslo, Norway.

Penguin Books

books

Assault on Reason

Inconvenient Truth

Al Gore

Nobel Peace Prize

global warming

climate change

environment

politics

current affairs