As Yom Kippur approaches, United Poultry Concerns is asking people to appeal to the Rabbinical Council to advocate that Kapparot rituals be carried out with money [given to charity] instead of live chickens.

To many New Yorkers, the preceding sentence makes perfect sense. To others, it may sound like I'm speaking Yiddish! Yom Kippur is the most important holiday in the Jewish year, the day of atonement. My Catholic-bred mind equates it to a big annual confession and the accompanying penance.

There's nothing wrong with an examination of one's conscience or the accompanying acts (or non-acts) of purity: wearing no leather, wearing white, fasting, righting wrongs. And there's nothing wrong with engaging in ritual.

But do join with UPC in their appeal. There's also no reason for chickens to be involved. ((Heeb'n'vegan discusses more alternatives: sponsoring a chicken at a sanctuary, or donating vegetarian food used in the ritual.))

By the time he reached his mid-forties, Jack Dreyfus was one of America’s most successful businessmen. He was the founder of the flourishing Dreyfus & Co and the Dreyfus Fund and winner of numerous awards in advertising, horseracing, gin rummy playing, golf, and tennis. He was literally at the top of his game.

All was not well, however. At the height of his fortune, he came down with crippling depression that left him sleepless, anxious, and distracted. He went to his doctor and asked him if he might try a drug called Dilantin, previously known only as an anti-epileptic. Dreyfus had a hunch that his depression was caused by his body not regulating its electricity properly and he knew that Dilantin helped deal with this problem in epileptics. Within a few hours of taking the drug, Dreyfus felt better, and began to investigate the other properties of the drug. He was astounded to find out that thousands of other medical studies had shown Dilantin to be useful for more than fifty other symptoms and disorders. However, because the drug was out of patent, there was no incentive for drug companies to petition the Federal Drug Administration (FDA) to make it available for these other disorders. Thus, as far as doctors knew, Dilantin was only suitable for epilepsy.

For the last forty years of his life, Dreyfus has been working through his charitable and health foundations to make politicians, physicians, and the general public aware of the extraordinary healing properties of Dilantin. Because of his work, the drug is now used more widely in America, and especially overseas, where its affordability and lack of negative side-effects have made it valuable in the treatment of cancer, AIDS, skin diseases, nausea, heart problems, attention deficit disorder, and many other illnesses. In spite of the documented evidence, however, the government and the pharmaceutical industry have resisted making the drug more widely available.

The Story of a Remarkable Medicine relates the extraordinary details of how this unlikely genius of finance and humanitarianism became the man he is. Told with Jack’s inimitable sense of humor and charm, the book also contains full details of the story of Dilantin and basic outlines of where and how it has proven useful. Written in Frustration is a short, pungent, and very funny take on Jack’s attempts as a private citizen with no financial interest in a drug trying to get the government and pharmaceutical industry to work for the public interest rather than personal or private gain. Composed in the spirit of Jack’s favorite American, Mark Twain, both books reflect the great humorist’s scathing wit, passionate belief in the rights of individuals, and distrust of the inertia of government and unchecked corporate power.

Lantern has published two books that do well when things in the world are going badly: No Easy Answers and Bird Flu.

The Bird Flu phenomenon is self-explanatory. Every time a flock is culled or the flu transmits to a human, people's interest in the subject tends to grow. And every time there is a school shooting, people want to read about the Columbine killings in No Easy Answers. In the office we talk about this response, and cringe a little. But the reality is that people need this book. They need to understand what can turn angst into murder. When unfathomable events happen, it is natural to want to dissect them, to study them, and to take steps to avoid the disaster happening again. The book doesn't let anyone off easy, instead calling for people to examine their own behavior, and the behavior that they endorse or excuse.

One Political Science professor at Virginia Tech took preventative measures, and 300 students read No Easy Answers in their introductory course. When this sort of non-violence education is made formal (especially in wounded atmospheres like VA Tech), we feel quite good about it. No cringing this time.

Finally, another book that's a kind of antidote. Violence can take other forms—the kind that's meted out upon you when you resist violence and the kind you see every day on television and on dinner plates. That's why Aftershock is an excellent, even necessary, book for those contemplating direct action to stop violence.

We live in an age of cynicism and commercialism, where all attempts at aspiration and calls for community are considered grandstanding or hucksterism. Lies are truths; and truths are dismissed as inconvenient. The president and vice-president have transparently committed high crimes and misdemeanors and only the grunts are prosecuted; torture is the American way and the pressing issue of climate change is reduced to tire gauges.

How refreshing, therefore, to see Man on Wire, a new documentary film about Philippe Petit, the French highwire artiste, conjuror, and all-round trickster, who on a misty day in August 1974, walked between the two towers of the almost-complete World Trade Center. When asked why he did it by eminently forensic and earthbound Americans, he replied as—dare I say it?—only the French can: "There is no why?" It was art, a performance, beyond reason, and therefore pure. L'art pour l'art.

Anyone who has paid attention to the John Edwards' infidelity scandal might be feeling a little nauseous at the hypocrisy, sanctimoniousness, and all-round sleaziness displayed by the media, the candidate, and his inamorata. Contrast this with the reckless abandonment (in all senses of the term) when it comes to les affaires de coeur displayed by the current French president, Nicolas Sarkozy, his first wife and her first husband, his second wife and her first and now third husband, and Monsieur le President's third wife, the chanteuse-cum-châtelaine Carla Bruni, and all of the above, plus Mick Jagger, Eric Clapton, and who knows who else?

For la comédie humaine and succès des scandales undertaken and experienced by these figures, whose bedhopping and impetuosity come straight from a Feydeau farce, you can read an article perfectly located in Vanity Fair. By contrast, Edwards' betrayal seems—perhaps accurately—small and petty, unimaginative and cheap. What these belles de jour and their bourgeois Casanovas are pointing out with relish is simple: If you are going to sleep with someone else, be bold and passionate and have fun. And, if you are the one betrayed, then pay it forward. In the end, everyone will have the same amount of pleasure and pain—and, well, c'est la vie.

When I was about ten years old, I loved reading a series of books that featured a boy called Jennings and his sidekick Derbyshire who got into what could only be termed "jolly scrapes" at a boys' boarding school in England. These harmless stories of naughtiness and pranks perfectly reflected the world in which I found myself—I too attended a boys' boarding school in England—even to the point that there was something timeless about the characters and the setting of the Jennings books. Jennings and Derbyshire never got older or wiser; their school never changed; the outside world never impinged. My school in the early 1970s felt much the same: it might as well have been the early 1950s for all there was a sense of times changing . . . or girls . . . or adulthood.

Of course, the point of reading is to bring you bigger worlds and more diverse experiences; to help you grope your way through life's passages and the ways of the heart and usher you into the complexities of getting older and needing to be, at least on the face of it, more responsible. Over the next three decades I read more broadly, and I like to think widened my circle of empathy. I just finished a short story in which I was asked to imagine what it must be like to be an old Chinese peasant seed keeper whose whole world is going to be inundated by the Three Gorges Dam. Jennings and Derbyshire it ain't.

Illnesses in childhood can be particularly devastating because they are both incomprehensible to the child and seem so unfair. Yet children can also be incredibly resilient and hopeful.

A particular example of this is found in the book How I Feel, the true story of a little boy called Steven who became ill with diabetes and how he managed to cope with it. Written and illustrated by his older brother Michael, the book is filled with fun and very immediate, kid’s-eye view cartoons of Steven’s adventures through his illness and healing, and provides an invaluable resource for children, parents, family members, teachers, and caregivers.

Another much misunderstood and previously undiagnosed disease is childhood obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). A Thought Is Just a Thought is the first storybook of its kind: the compelling and sympathetic story of Jenny, who suffers from OCD. The kind Dr. Mike helps Jenny overcome her fears by showing her how to rethink the bad thoughts, and eventually she stops dwelling on the thought and its irrational consequences, realizing that, after all, a thought is just a thought. This unique work, with a foreword by the medical director of the OCD Institute in Belmont, MA, will enable parents and doctors to understand how best to help children deal with suffering from this debilitating psychological illness.

Although Lorie Eve Dechar's Five Spirits is ostensibly a book about acupuncture and traditional Chinese medicine, it is at its heart a book about human consciousness.

The book explores the question of how human beings create reality and how our creation of reality affects not only our health but also the way we feel, live, and interact with our environment. By melding the wisdom of the ancient Chinese with the insights of modern Western depth psychology and the understanding of Taoist and European alchemy, the book aims to help readers discover a new, more efficient, and integrated consciousness. Through this discovery, we will find not only new ways to heal psychosomatic, psychological, and spiritual distress but also new possibilities for living, and new ways to relate to our bodies, our families, and communities, as well as to our planet.

One important key to this new consciousness is a revised relationship to the yin, or what the ancient Taoists referred to as the Mysterious Feminine. This attitude views the the divine not only as an invisible, unknowable mystery (up there and far away in heaven) but also as a knowable, embodied experience, a sacred illumination that exists here and now, as the life force that flows through our bodies, through nature and all of creation.

Five Spirits is subtitled "Alchemical Acupuncture for Psychological and Spiritual Healing" in order to distinquish it from TCM or Traditional Chinese Medicine, the more medical, symptom-focused acupuncture that it is currently being practiced in Mainland China and most parts of the Western world. Alchemy is the ancient art of transformation, not only the transformation of lead into gold as is most commonly understood, but the transformation of the lead of human suffering into the gold of wisdom, the transformation of an ordinary human being into a sage. The focus of "Alchemical Acupuncture" is not the curing of superficial symptoms and the restoration of old, outmoded ways of living but rather on transformation, on the discovery of new, more exciting and potent ways of living and being on the planet.

Alchemical Acupuncture seeks to find the treasure in the trash, the meaning and the possibilities for spiritual transformation hidden in our painful physical symptoms and psychological distress. This spiritual attitude is found in the earliest Chinese medical texts, written over two thousand years ago. These texts were strongly influenced by Taoist
alchemy, but this attitude has gradually been buried as acupuncture has been taken up by the more materialistic, modern world. It is the premise of this book that in order to tap the deepest potential of Chinese medicine, we must understand the alchemical principles at its core. But an understanding of these principles can also help us to solve problems and resolve insoluble dilemmas that go beyond the scope of of acupuncture.

The more perceptive among you will notice that Lantern no longer sells Planetwalker, environmentalist John Francis's stirring account of how an oil spill in San Francisco bay in 1971 compelled him to become a peace pilgrim—taking a vow of silence (which he kept for seventeen years) and eschewing all means of oil-based transportation. He then walked across the United States, strumming his banjo, writing poems, and relying on the good will of his fellow countrymen and -women. You can watch him in person, here, and read more here.

The simple fact is that Lantern were the distributors of John's self-published book, and he finally found a publisher to take him on: National Geographic. John's doing a lot of walking and talking these days, and has many projects in the works. But we at Lantern are delighted to have accompanied him in his journey for a few miles. He was very pleasant company!

For over fifty years as the founder of Fo Guang Shan, the Taiwanese Buddhist Venerable Master Hsing Yun has been preaching what he calls "Humanistic Buddhism."

This is a Buddhism stripped of superstition and ritualism and dedicated to making the religion relevant in everyday life and for everyday problems. In Living Affinity and Opening the Mind’s Eye, Hsing Yun shows how Buddhism offers both immediate and long-term solutions to the environmental crisis (in the former) and the personal and spiritual problems (in the latter). With his deep knowledge of the Buddhist scriptures, his infectious love of Chinese poetry, and his generous and witty mind, Hsing Yun offers a voice out of the Chinese Buddhist tradition finally emerging from the long silence of communism. It is a voice refreshingly unfamiliar to a North American audience.

One of Hsing Yun’s leading disciples is the Venerable Yifa. In her book Safeguarding the Heart, Yifa reflects on September 11, 2001, and what the terrible events of that day can teach us about the essential Buddhist teachings on suffering, cause and effect, and the meaning of life. With clarity and honesty, she attempts to answer the question of how we can and should respond when great violence enters our lives. This book has now been revised and retitled as The Tender Heart.

Yifa has also turned her attention to our culture of consumerism, commodification, and superficiality. In Authenticity, Yifa looks at our thoughtless when it comes to food, stuff, communication, relationships, and thoughts and emotions, and offers practical and thoughtful techniques for living life more authentically and attentively.

Buddhism has long held that all life forms are sacred and worthy of kind actions and explicitly includes animals in its moral universe. The first precept of Buddhism "do not kill," should apply to our treatment of animals as well as to our treatment of other human beings. Yet some Buddhists eat meat and meat eating is sometimes defended as consistent with Buddhist teaching. The Great Compassion by practicing Buddhist Norm Phelps studies the sutras that command respect for all life and various schools of Buddhist thought to see if Buddhist practice demands vegetarianism, and comes up with some surprising answers.

At the HSUS annual conference last weekend, I had a long conversation with a woman about backyard chickens.

In the environmental movement, and slow & local food movements there are more and more people interested in keeping backyard chickens. If you're an egg eater, this is a step in the right direction, since it keeps your money from going to factory farms, avoids some of the evils of transport, etc. Sadly, there are still problems. A lot of backyard chicken keepers order chicks through the mail from breeders. Breeders, bad. Sending live animals through the mail, bad. And, the most compelling reason for vegetarians and ethical people of all stripes: There's still no use for the male birds. They're killed, routinely and cruelly. They have no value. No matter how well you treat those egg-producing chickens in your yard, their family members have been killed because they can't "produce."

Chiron Publications, which is distributed by Lantern, is the premier publisher of books on analytical psychology in the United States.

Carl Gustav Jung (1875-1961) was a Swiss psychiatrist and the founder of the analytical psychology that now bears his name. Many of Chiron's titles deal specifically with Jung's theories and ideas, but some are more relevant to Jung's life and thought. In C. G. Jung: The Fundamentals of Theory and Practice, Elie Humbert brings a unique understanding of Jung's ideas, developed over many years within the atmosphere of French psychoanalytic thought. In C. G. Jung: His Friendships with Mary Mellon and J.B. Priestley William Schoenl uncovers two long-lasting relationships that influenced three important voices in twentieth-century ideas. Now revised, Jung; His Life and Work by one of his leading intepreters and emanuenses Barbara Hannah is the most encompassing guide, while Young Carl Jung presents a fascinating psycho-biography of the man who became one of the leading guides to the soul in the last two hundred years.

The nineteenth-century abolitionist Frederick Douglass perhaps summed up the philosophy of direct action best: "If there is no struggle there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom and yet depreciate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground, they want rain without thunder and lightning."

Two recent movements that have decided to thunder and plow the ground are the Animal Liberation Front (ALF) and the Earth Liberation Front (ELF). Both groups are committed to direct action. They do not believe that the earth or the animals who share the planet with us "belong" to anyone; they do not agree with the law that the earth or animals are our "property." So they break into and/or destroy private property, either covertly or overtly, and rescue animals from mink farms or labs or burn down ski resorts or other places that contribute to environmental destruction. Although their rhetoric may seem violent to some, those who subscribe to the ALF and ELF philosophy do not believe in physically harming any being, including humans.

You probably don't know who Stephen Blackwelder is, but you've been looking at the results of his handiwork for months now. He, and his wife JoAnne, were the owners of 128 Second Place, where Lantern now has its offices, and it was he who planted the huge cherry tree, whose blossoms graced us this spring, the flowers that bloomed as well, and the many trees that line our block.

He died on June 13, less than a year after leaving the house and garden he'd loving cared for for twenty-nine years. He was a raffish personality, who worked in the world of publishing—someone like yours truly, except with a lot more raffishness and probably a lot more work. Judging by the hundreds of folks who turned out for his memorial service, he'll be missed. But his garden and his house that we at Lantern enjoy every day will be his living memorial.

When people ask me, "Is Lantern a non-profit?" I always joke, "only to our accountant." It's true: we're not a non-profit organization, but publishing is one of those non-business businesses that are more cultural endeavor than money-making venture.

All this is by way of saying that, while we'd really like to get by on just publishing books and creating websites, we could make use of a donation or two to help us keep doing what we're doing. It's not tax deductible, but it would be much appreciated.

Or you could buy a book for your local library or send one to a prisoner you know, or give one to your local high school. There are all sorts of ways to support us, and we hope you will. To all of those who have already bought one or more of our books: thank you! We hope you've been enlightened, entertained, infuriated, and otherwise engaged with.

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