What We Are Reading Today: ‘A New Earth’ - Awakening to Your Life’s Purpose

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Updated 05 August 2024
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What We Are Reading Today: ‘A New Earth’ - Awakening to Your Life’s Purpose

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Author: Eckhart Tolle

“A New Earth” by German writer Eckhart Tolle is a transformative work published originally in 2005 before it was selected in 2008 for Oprah’s Book Club and was featured in a series of weekly webinars with Tolle and Winfrey.

Tolle, a spiritual teacher and bestselling author of several books such as “The Power of Now” and “Stillness Speaks,” writes that most of the struggle people go through is not an outcome of external factors but a result of what is happening inside the mind.

The self-help book invites readers to reflect on and understand their egos. By bringing awareness to human nature and ego’s impact on behavior, the author encourages readers to shift their thoughts from the negative thinking that might be clouding their experience of living in the present moment.

Tolle stresses the importance of recognizing ego, as opposed to the actual self, as a mental pattern constructed through habits rather than facts or realistic ideas of one’s true personality.

In doing so, people will be able to have a flexible mindset, allow growth, and start aligning their actions with core values and inner wisdom, Tolle notes.

The author also talks about the negative feelings that some people might experience during the process of personal development and challenges them to accept themselves regardless, even when faced with complicated emotions.

“A New Earth” is a great choice for readers who search for deep insights, wish to let go of old habits that do not serve them, and embrace a more fulfilling way of thinking.

 


What We Are Reading Today: ‘African Modernism’

What We Are Reading Today: ‘African Modernism’
Updated 30 June 2025
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What We Are Reading Today: ‘African Modernism’

What We Are Reading Today: ‘African Modernism’

Edited by: Manuel Herz

The late 1950s and early 1960s saw a large number of central and sub-Saharan African countries gaining independence, and one of the key ways in which they expressed their newly established national identity was through distinctive architecture.

Parliament buildings, stadiums, universities, central banks, convention halls, and other major public buildings and housing projects were built in daring, even heroic designs.

“African Modernism” takes a close look at the relationship between these cutting-edge architectural projects, according to a review on goodreads.com. The book will be of interest to historians of architecture and students alike.


What We Are Reading Today: ‘A Leaf Unturned’: Short story collection explores questions of identity, social constraint

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Updated 30 June 2025
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What We Are Reading Today: ‘A Leaf Unturned’: Short story collection explores questions of identity, social constraint

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  • “Saifi is an accomplished writer with a deep understanding of the human condition, particularly when it comes to themes of desire, identity, and societal constraint

Author: Shamim Saifi

“A Leaf Unturned” is the English translation of a collection of short stories originally written in Urdu by Shamim Saifi, one of India’s leading short story writers.

The stories were originally published by Bihar Urdu Academy under the title “Ek Warq,” and have been translated by Syed Sarwar Hussain, a professor of English at Riyadh’s King Saud University who has translated several books of renowned Indian and Pakistani writers.

Shamim Saifi.

Saifi, who died in 1994 while serving as a High Court judge, demonstrates a deep understanding of the human psyche, particularly in relation to themes of identity, and the struggles of individuals living on the margins of society.

The collection contains 12 short stories, each with a different flavor of writing, but all rich in symbolism and often with a stream-of-consciousness pattern that allows readers to follow each character’s inner thought process.

The stories offer a distinctive kaleidoscope of Joycean surrealism, Kafkaesque existentialism, and Faulknerian symbolism.

Sarwar Hussain writes in his introduction: “Shamim Saifi’s work is marked by its ability to evoke strong emotional responses and its keen insight into the complex intersections between personal desire, societal expectations, and existential crises.

“Saifi is an accomplished writer with a deep understanding of the human condition, particularly when it comes to themes of desire, identity, and societal constraint. His writing is rich in symbolism and emotional resonance, making him a writer whose work invites introspection and reflection.”

The book is available on Amazon.in and Kindle.

 


What We Are Reading Today: ‘Grasshoppers, Locusts, and Crickets of the World’

What We Are Reading Today: ‘Grasshoppers, Locusts, and Crickets of the World’
Updated 29 June 2025
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What We Are Reading Today: ‘Grasshoppers, Locusts, and Crickets of the World’

What We Are Reading Today: ‘Grasshoppers, Locusts, and Crickets of the World’

Edited by Martin Husemann and Oliver Hawlitschek

Grasshoppers, locusts, crickets, bush crickets, and katydids make up the order of insects known as Orthoptera.

Although there about 30,000 species of Orthoptera around the world, many people pay little attention to them and even scientists know relatively little about them.

Yet the world of grasshoppers is a fascinating and diverse one.


What We Are Reading Today: The Ticos

What We Are Reading Today: The Ticos
Updated 28 June 2025
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What We Are Reading Today: The Ticos

What We Are Reading Today: The Ticos

Authors: Mavis Hiltunen Biesanz, Richard Biesanz

Written with the perspective of more than half a century of first-hand observation, this unparalleled social and cultural history describes how Costa Rica’s economy, government, education and health-care systems, family structures, religion, and other institutions have evolved, and how this evolution has affected and reflected people’s daily lives, beliefs, and their values. 

The authors are particularly concerned with change since the economic crisis of the early 1980s and the structural adjustment that followed.

The book provides a comprehensive introduction to a country the writers know well, according to a review on goodreads.com.


What We Are Reading Today: ‘Private Finance, Public Power’

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Updated 27 June 2025
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What We Are Reading Today: ‘Private Finance, Public Power’

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  • Public-private negotiations over financial governance has evolved into an essential ecosystem of banking risk management

Authors: Peter Conti-Brown and Sean H. Vanatta

Banks in America are private institutions with private shareholders, boards of directors, profit motives, customers, and competitors. And yet the public plays a key role in deciding what risks are taken as well as how, when, and to what end. Public-private negotiations over financial governance has evolved into an essential ecosystem of banking risk management.

In “Private Finance, Public Power,” Peter Conti-Brown and Sean Vanatta offer a new history of finance and public policy in the US by examining the idiosyncratic way the nation manages financial risk across the public-private divide.

Covering two centuries, from the founding of the Republic to the early 1980s, Conti-Brown and Vanatta describe the often-contested, sometimes chaotic, engagement of bankers, politicians, bureaucrats, and others in the overlapping spaces of the public-private system of bank supervision.