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Published Jan 2023
240 pages
Genre: History, Current Affairs and Religion
Publication Information
From "one of the most soulful and perceptive writers of our time" (Brain Pickings): a journey through competing ideas of paradise to see how we can live more peacefully in an ever more divided and distracted world.
Paradise: that elusive place where the anxieties, struggles, and burdens of life fall away. Most of us dream of it, but each of us has very different ideas about where it is to be found. For some it can be enjoyed only after death; for others, it's in our midst—or just across the ocean—if only we can find eyes to see it.
Traveling from Iran to North Korea, from the Dalai Lama's Himalayas to the ghostly temples of Japan, Pico Iyer brings together a lifetime of explorations to upend our ideas of utopia and ask how we might find peace in the midst of difficulty and suffering. Does religion lead us back to Eden or only into constant contention? Why do so many seeming paradises turn into warzones? And does paradise exist only in the afterworld – or can it be found in the here and now?
For almost fifty years Iyer has been roaming the world, mixing a global soul's delight in observing cultures with a pilgrim's readiness to be transformed. In this culminating work, he brings together the outer world and the inner to offer us a surprising, original, often beautiful exploration of how we might come upon paradise in the midst of our very real lives.
"With keen observation and beautiful language, Iyer shows us the essential truths of places, people, and ideas." - Kirkus Review (starred review)
"Immersive and profound... Iyer matches penetrating insights with some of the most transportive prose around. This further burnishes Iyer's reputation as one of the best." - Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"Profound… A numinous blend of deeply attentive travel writing, history, memoir, and reflection… There is much wonder here." - Booklist (starred review)
"Pico Iyer has done the impossible with this book... This is a singular offering of magnetic story, deep thinking, truth telling, and spiritual refreshment for our tumultuous young century." - New York Times bestselling author Krista Tippett
"In elegant and ecstatic prose, Pico Iyer uncovers our wonderful capacity for hope, wearing his erudition so lightly. I was revitalized by this book." - New York Times bestselling author Katherine May
"To step into The Half Known Life feels both a privilege and a necessity... Iyer is more than a guide or a compatriot in an unfamiliar land: in the inward journey to lucidity he is a companion of our own searching minds." - PEN Award winner Yiyun Li
"In this brilliantly told Buddhist parable, Pico Iyer takes the reader from London to Santa Barbara, Jerusalem to Sri Lanka, Japan's Bridge of Heaven to Varanasi, exploring the insatiable human longing for Paradise while acutely observing—with irony, wit, and empathy—the paradoxes inherent in actual experience." - New York Times bestselling author Dr. Elaine Pagels
"Nothing less than a guided tour of the human soul. Filled with hope, wisdom, and extraordinary tenderness, this is a book not only for the ages, but for our very specific, very troubled age. A masterpiece." - New York Times bestselling author Elizabeth Gilbert
"This book combines the wisdom of a lifelong traveler with the insights of a dazzling range of spiritual traditions, sparking our enthusiasm for more adventures: both around the world and inside the soul." - Pulitzer Prize winner Benjamin Moser
This information about The Half Known Life was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Pico Iyer is the acclaimed and bestselling author of more than a dozen books, translated into twenty-three languages. His journalism has appeared in Time, The New York Times, The New York Review of Books, the Financial Times, and more than 250 other periodicals worldwide. His TED talks have been viewed over eleven million times. He divides his time between Japan and a Benedictine hermitage in California.
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