Books about Longings from Amazon.com

Although she still prays for Caleb, Nellie Mae Fisher has broken up with her beau. Now, her heart's greatest longing is for more knowledge of the Lord.

Caleb yearns for freedom, as his plans to leave Honeybrook have been thwarted He must stay on as caretaker for his father, who was crippled in a wintertime accident. He also longs for Nellie Mae, still hoping that she will return to the Old Order...and to him. Christian Yoder, a young Mennonite man, longs to get to know Nellie Mae better...and to share with her the secrets of her sister Suzy's final days. Rhoda, Nellie's older sister, longs for more of what the world has to offer--from fancy clothes, to her own car, to a new English boyfriend.

Meanwhile, father Reuben Fisher longs for unity--among his family and all the brethren.

Whose longing will be satisfied, and whose will not?.
Price: $11.19 [Notify me when price goes down.]

"Long before we do anything explicitly religious at all, we have to do something about the fire that burns within us," writes Ronald Rolheiser "What we do with that fire, how we channel it, is our spirituality " From the opening chapter, where Rolheiser eloquently compares the burning spiritual fire of Mother Teresa, Janice Joplin, and Princess Diana, readers will be fully engaged in a unique and altogether fascinating discussion of Christian spirituality.

As a regular columnist for the Catholic Herald, Rolheiser has clearly honed his writing skills. Like an eloquent marriage counselor, he deftly tries to reconcile the rift between contemporary spirituality and Christianity. For example, he points to the four pillars that support a healthy marriage of Christianity and spirituality, which are "Private prayer and private morality. Social justice. Mellowness of heart and spirit. Community as a constitutive element of true worship." Building upon these pillars, Rolheiser delves into the more challenging marital tensions with chapters such as "Christ as the Basis for Christian Spirituality" and a "Spirituality of Sexuality." This is an excellent book for any Christian who has longs to create a more holy and lasting spiritual union. --Gail Hudson.
Price: $10.91 [Notify me when price goes down.]

Leonard Cohen wrote the poems in Book of Longing—his first book of poetry in more than twenty years—during his five-year stay at a Zen monastery on Southern California's Mount Baldy, and in Los Angeles, Montreal, and Mumbai. This dazzling collection is enhanced by the author's playful and provocative drawings, which interact in exciting, unexpected ways on the page with poetry that is timeless, meditative, and often darkly humorous. An international sensation, Book of Longing contains all the elements that have brought Cohen's artistry with language worldwide recognition.

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Price: $8.27 [Notify me when price goes down.]

Written by an author whose expertise grew from an extensive counseling practice as well as personal experience. The Fertile Female offers a hope-filled view of reproductive difficulties, with a deeper understanding of the often-confusing messages of mind-body and alternative medicine. With an engaging mix of passion and humor the book initiates a public debate on the politics of infertility and its effect on our health care system. Includes practice exercises and a section on dietary recommendations, complete with recipes..
Price: $15.94 [Notify me when price goes down.]

Now in paperback, this is the definitive collection of America's bestselling poet Rumi's finest poems of love and lovers. In Coleman Barks' delightful and wise renderings, these poems will open your heart and soul to the lover inside and out.

'There are lovers content with longing

I'm not one of them.'

Rumi is best known for his poems expressing the ecstasies and mysteries of love of all kinds – erotic, divine, friendship –and Coleman Barks collects here the best of those poems, ranging from the 'wholeness' one experiences with a true lover, to the grief of a lover's loss, and all the states in between: from the madness of sudden love to the shifting of a romance to deep friendship – these poems cover all 'the magnificent regions of the heart'.

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Price: $7.76 [Notify me when price goes down.]

Jerusalem is the site of some of the most famous religious monuments in the world, from the Dome of the Rock to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre to the Western Wall of the Temple. Since the nineteenth century, the city has been a premier tourist destination, not least because of the countless religious pilgrims from the three Abrahamic faiths.

But Jerusalem is more than a tourist site—it is a city where every square mile is layered with historical significance, religious intensity, and extraordinary stories. It is a city rebuilt by each ruling Empire in its own way: the Jews, the Romans, the Christians, the Muslims, and for the past sixty years, the modern Israelis. What makes Jerusalem so unique is the heady mix, in one place, of centuries of passion and scandal, kingdom-threatening wars and petty squabbles, architectural magnificence and bizarre relics, spiritual longing and political cruelty. It is a history marked by three great forces: religion, war, and monumentality.

In this book, Simon Goldhill takes on this peculiar archaeology of human imagination, hope, and disaster to provide a tour through the history of this most image-filled and ideology-laden city—from the bedrock of the Old City to the towering roofs of the Holy Sepulchre. Along the way, we discover through layers of buried and exposed memories—the long history, the forgotten stories, and the lesser-known aspects of contemporary politics that continue to make Jerusalem one of the most embattled cities in the world.

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Price: $16.95 [Notify me when price goes down.]

Miniature books, eighteenth-century novels, Tom Thumb weddings, tall tales, and objects of tourism and nostalgia: this diverse group of cultural forms is the subject of On Longing, a fascinating analysis of the ways in which everyday objects are narrated to animate or realize certain versions of the world. Originally published in 1984 (Johns Hopkins University Press), and now available in paperback for the first time, this highly original book draws on insights from semiotics and from psychoanalytic, feminist, and marxist criticism. Addressing the relations of language to experience, the body to scale, and narratives to objects, Susan Stewart looks at the "miniature" as a metaphor for interiority and at the "gigantic" as an exaggeration of aspects of the exterior. In the final part of her essay Stewart examines the ways in which the "souvenir" and the "collection" are objects mediating experience in time and space..
Price: $15.00 [Notify me when price goes down.]

Following in the footsteps of the highly acclaimed novel The Gentle Axe, featuring the detective Porfiry Petrovich in another atmospheric and gripping slice of nineteenth-century Russia

It’s the middle of a hot, dusty St. Petersburg summer in the late 1860s. A doctor brings home a fancy box of chocolates for his wife and son—a strange gift on a sweltering Saturday afternoon. Within an hour, both mother and child die an excruciating death, and the doctor is immediately arrested, suspected of poisoning. As investigator Porfiry Petrovich concedes, in such cases the obvious solution often turns out to be the correct solution. And in the city’s steamy, oppressive atmosphere, even he lacks the energy to delve any deeper.

But when further, apparently unconnected, murders occur on the other side of town, a subtle and surprising pattern starts to emerge. Porfiry is forced to reassess his assumptions and follow a tenuous, uncertain trail that takes him into the hidden, squalid heart of the city and brings him face-to-face with incomprehensible horror and cruelty. A Vengeful Longing is a taut, enthralling mystery, a vivid and utterly unforgettable rendering of a brutal and stifling nineteenth- century St. Petersburg..
Price: $9.47 [Notify me when price goes down.]

Whether you lost your father through death or divorce, or you wished he would have said "I love you" instead of merely being a good provider, you may harbor unresolved hurt in your soul.

When denied meaningful contact with our fathers, either physically or emotionally, a gaping hole or "father hunger" emerges in the child's psyche. If left unfulfilled, this "father hunger" triggers pronounced psychological patterns consigning that child to personal and professional dead-ends as an adult. Father hunger manifests itself in many forms: workaholism, substance abuse, chronic depression, sexual promiscuity, violent behavior, food addiction, and an inability to sustain intimate relationships.

Dr. Beth Erickson shows you how to identify, validate and heal the pain surrounding father loss and explore the spiritual crises that unresolved loss such as this generates. By sharing compelling case studies of men and women, and her own personal struggle to accept her father's death, she guides you through the healing process. After reading the dialogues and completing the exercises, you will fill the hole in your soul and emerge from the journey at peace with yourself and your relationships with your father.

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Price: $7.25 [Notify me when price goes down.]

Welcome to the Fisherman's Rest, a little bar off the Sasoon Dock in Bombay where Mr. Subramaniam spins his tales for a select audience. This is the setting for Vikram Chandra's collection of seven short stories, Love and Longing in Bombay, and Subramaniam is Chandra's Scheherezade. In these stories, Chandra has covered the gamut of genres: there is a ghost story, a love story, a murder mystery, and a crime story, each tale joined to the others by the voice of the elusive narrator. In "Shakti," a discussion about real estate leads to the story of a soldier who must exorcise a ghostly child from his family home. In the final story, "Shanti," a young woman's despair about the state of the country becomes a springboard for a tale of love and hope.

Love and Longing in Bombay is a mesmerizing collection, filled with fully rounded characters and stories that resonate long after the book is back on the shelf. Chandra's prose is luminous, his tales satisfying. Scheherezade would be impressed..
Price: $5.96 [Notify me when price goes down.]