Too often we celebrate the mind and the spirit and forget that we are incarnate beings, merely but magnificently mortal. While it's true that our flesh will ultimately fail and die, our passage on this earth is nevertheless contained within what the Anglo-Saxons accurately and evocatively called the "bone house," which in spite of how much we ignore it, abuse it, or forget we have it, remains incredibly resilient and resourceful for much of our lives. That's why we need to protect and cherish it, and that's why Lantern Books publishes titles that can help you do just that.

In Condom Sense, Dr. Monica Sweeney, director of the New York City Bureau of HIV/AIDS Prevention and Control, makes it clear that the AIDS epidemic is not over, not only in Africa and Asia, but in North America and Europe, where a new generation of young men and women are returning to sex without condoms, resulting in a dramatic increase in HIV cases after years of decline. Her message is clear and strong: The best protection is prevention, with latex condoms. Condom Sense uncompromisingly focuses on the reality of human lives and tells you how to stay safe.

From age-old scourges like smallpox and tuberculosis to emerging threats like AIDS and SARS, our interactions with animals have played a pivotal role as the source of human disease.

Before there was swine flu (H1N1), there was bird flu (H5N1). In spite of the visibility of H1N1, leading public health authorities still predict as inevitable a pandemic of influenza, triggered by bird flu and expected to lead to millions of deaths around the globe. The influenza virus has existed for millions of years as an innocuous intestinal virus of wild ducks. What turned a harmless waterborne duck virus into a killer? In Bird Flu, Dr. Michael Greger traces the human role in the evolution of this virus, whose humble beginnings belie its transformation into a killer mutant strain with the potential to become as ferocious as Ebola and as contagious as the common cold. In the face of the coming pandemic, Dr. Greger reveals what we can do to protect our families and what human society to can do to reduce the likelihood of such catastrophes in the future.

Much of what makes weight loss work is having the right attitude: a feeling of joy in one's life and not the dread of deprivation. A case in point is Norris Chumley, author of The Joy of Weight Loss. He'd been on virtually every diet, and they'd all failed. He tipped the scales at the 400 pounds time and time again. He felt hopeless, and, in rare glimpses of honesty, secretly admitted that he was slowly committing suicide. His book tells the dramatic story of how he turned his life around, discovered joy, happiness, and permanent freedom from obesity and offers a straightforward way for you to manage your weight. Likewise Victoria Moran. As she recounts in The Love-Powered Diet, she yo-yo'd in weight, until she realized that she had to love the body she had to get to the body she wanted.

Donna Beaudoin had tried to go vegetarian over and over again, only to be brought down by her own doubts and family, friends, and co-workers, who told her that she'd be giving up her culture, her looks, and a whole host of nonsense ("drama!") if she stopped eating meat. She finally decided to chart her own course and the result is Sister Vegetarian's 31 Days of Drama-Free Living, a book that will take you day by day through the process of changing your life. Donna (a.k.a. Sister Vegetarian) lost forty pounds, regained her health, and is now full of zest and zip.

For more on Norris Chumley, click here. For more on Victoria Moran, click here. For more on Donna Beaudoin, click here

If there's one person who truly knows the costs of AIDS in the United States, it is Monica Sweeney, M.D.

As a doctor working in the heart of the inner city at the Bedford-Stuyvesant Family Health Center in Brooklyn, New York, Dr. Sweeney saw how HIV/AIDS moved from being a disease of gay, white men or intravenous drug users to one that affects families, women, people of color, and the poor. In her trenchant and passionate Condom Sense: A Guide to Sexual Survival in the New Millennium, Dr. Sweeney and co-writer Rita Kirwan Grisman make relevant to today's young and at risk how essential it is that they protect themselves from risky sexual behavior.

Frank, practical, and straightforward, Condom Sense is an essential guide for public health advocates, parents, and any individual negotiating the world of intimdate relationships in the twenty-first century.

For more on World AIDS Day, click here.

Call for Submissions!

Lantern is putting together an anthology of international contributors who are Latina and vegan, and wonder if you're interested in writing for the project.

Two years ago we published SISTAH VEGAN, which includes writing from a very diverse group of African-American women about veganism. The volume is interesting because it's not just stories of why or how individuals went vegan, but it is heavily cultured, discussing hair, music, health, body types, tradition(s), religion(s), black politics, and more.

We are hoping to create a similar (and yet completely different!) book by vegan women from Mexican, Brazilian, Peruvian, Guatemalan, Argentinian, Puerto Rican (and more) backgrounds.

Topics written about should be based in personal experience, and avoid references and footnotes if at all possible.

If you are able to write in English and Spanish or Portuguese, we'd love to have your piece in multiple languages. The non-English pieces will not be in the printed book, but we hope to make them available digitally. However, they will not be able to be proofed and corrected by Lantern.

We cannot provide payment, but we are planning to donate proceeds to the Food Empowerment Project. The word count is 2,500-5,000 words. The deadline is December 15th, 2012.

Spread the word!

Email submissions to wendy (at) lanternbooks (dot) com and kara (at) lanternbooks (dot) com.

Ginny Jordan's inspiring and powerful memoir, Clear Cut, is one of those books that grows and settles in the mind after you've read it, embedding its startling images and honest toughness in one's memory. The challenges that Ginny has faced in her life are unrelenting—wave after wave of operations and loss. And yet, she's reminded through her work, her family, and her friends that sorrow, like strength, is not ours alone to bear, and that it's possible to experience a kind of grace and dignity amid suffering and difficulty. Ginny's gimlet eye misses none of the humor, absurdity, transcendence, and even poetry of living within our ever-changing and fragile-tenacious bodies. Clear Cut is a beautiful work, one that I'm very proud to have worked on, and I commend it to your attention.

After being diagnosed with breast cancer at the age of forty-seven and not getting satisfactory answers from her physicians, Ruth Heidrich began her journey to fitness. She has now lived three decades without a recurrence of symptoms—a story she writes about in her extraordinary and inspirational A Race for Life.

"[I learned] I was responsible for my own health care," she reports. Heidrich went on to receive her Ph.D. in Health Management. Affectionately known as "the other Dr. Ruth," (whom we also publish, by the way) Heidrich is sharing what she has learned and changing the way people view their senior years. In Senior Fitness, Ruth shows us how to maintain and even increase physical and sexual fitness at any age, as well as how to reduce the risks of prostate cancer, varicose veins, osteoporosis, diabetes, cardiovascular disease, arthritis, Alzheimer's, and a host of other ailments associated with aging. Since her diagnoses of cancer, Ruth Heidrich has gone on to win more than nine hundred athletic trophies and metals. She has been cancer-free for more than twenty years.

Donna Beaudoin was, like Fannie Lou Hamer, sick and tired of being sick and tired. She'd put on weight, experienced aching joints and chronic stomach pains, and generally felt blah. She'd tried a vegetarian diet before, but the drama of dealing with family, friends, co-workers, and others not supportive of her lifestyle, had always gotten in the way. In Sister Vegetarian's 31 Days of Drama-Free Living, Donna shows you how to leave the drama behind, get off your butt, and have fun moving and eating great-tasting and health-giving food. It sure worked for her: she lost weight, gained energy, and her ailments left her. This is the book for anyone who needs motivation to change their lives for the healthier!

And we have more! In The Joy of Weight Loss and The Love-Powered Diet, Norris Chumley and Victoria Moran (both of whom were critically overweight) respectively encourage you to lose weight by feeling good about yourself rather than forcing yourself onto a restrictive diet and demanding that you suffer for your sins. In the former, Norris Chumley lost over 180 pounds, and kept it off, by learning to love himself and enjoy movement, and this is his secret to shedding the pounds. In the latter, Victoria learned that her dieting was only leading her to binge, and that a crucial step to a healthy body was to nurture a healthy attitude toward food.

Of course, a healthful diet wouldn't be much use if you didn't know one end of a vegetable from the other. Never fear, Lantern is here to help. How to Eat Like a Vegetarian Even If You Never Want to Be One provides steps, strategies, and simple recipes to start a healthy meat-free lifestyle without you even having to call yourself the "v" word.

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 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.

As children grow they are always faced not with just physically problems but also mentally. Two of our books, An Unchanged Mind, and To Change a Mind (both by Dr. John McKinnon), look at why some young people find it so hard to transition from childhood to adulthood. An Unchanged Mind examines what Dr. McKinnon calls disrupted maturation, and explains that the cure to the problem is not in pills. To Change a Mind is a companion book for parents on how adolescent development can be derailed in today's complex culture and how to prevent the problem from happening in the first place.

The work and self-knowledge required to transition successfully from adolescence to maturity are not only the child's responsibility. They're the parents, too. Krissy Pozatek's The Parallel Process urges parents to undergo the same process of self-examination and honest self-assessment as their children do as the latter go through treatment.

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

Holistic medicine offers a paradigm of wellness that differs from the trauma and severe deficiencies of our current "sickness care" system.

One aspect of this system that demands attention is the issue of vaccination. In their first five years of life, children are expected to undergo an extraordinary thirty-seven doses of eleven different vaccines, yet relatively few parents are aware of the risks involved. As the writers in The Vaccination Dilemma indicate, a growing body of research has linked immunization with autism, seizures, asthma, arthritis, Crohn's disease, hyperactivity, and learning disabilities. Balanced and thoughtful, this book clearly describes the immune system, its workings (and what science does and does not know about them), and helps parents make educated decisions on behalf of their children.

A Practical Peacemaker Ponders . . .

I'd been hearing great praise for the documentary Vegucated, and this week was able to see it at a vegan potluck/movie event. Three average meat-eating New Yorkers agree to go vegan for six weeks and have their experience filmed. They get lots--and I mean lots--of support and expert advice. It begins with the filmmakers, who show them vegan advocacy films, take them grocery shopping, dining out, and to a farmed animal sanctuary. Their "vegucation" is also provided by such luminaries as Howard Lyman (a contributor to Lantern's book The Way of Compassion), Dr. Joel Fuhrman, Dr. Milton Mills, T. Colin Campbell, and other speakers and participants at the Vegetarian Summerfest, which the three attend as part of the experiment. How fortunate they were to get this kind of solid information and encouragement, compared to those of us who went vegan years ago and had to figure it all out for ourselves! Viewers, of course, get all the same encouragement vicariously by watching the film, and can find more at the Get Vegucated website, including the movie trailer; Vegan at Heart, a four-week-long daily email coaching program; tips on making social connections with other local vegans; the DVD available for purchase ($19.99); and info on hosting a screening.

Photo: Bev
Sykes

Doubtless you have already heard the latest news story, so thick with irony that it is its own satire. Paula Deen, the "queen of butter," not only announces that she has Type 2 Diabetes, but -- wait! there's more! -- announces that she has become a paid spokeswoman for pharmaceutical company Novo Nordisk. She's even got a web site to promote her bad habits.

Since the irony will likely be lost on a lot of people, I'll spell it out.

Most Americans accept degenerative chronic diseases such as obesity, diabetes, atherosclerosis, heart disease, osteoporosis and cancer as part of the normal aging process.

Yet it need not be this way. In her thoroughly researched and comprehensive The Vegan Diet as Chronic Disease Prevention, Dr. Kerrie Saunders documents how a plant-based diet can help prevent or alleviate many chronic diseases that affect so many Americans, often without the need for pills, surgery, or fad diets. In this thoroughly researched and comprehensive guide, Dr. Kerrie Saunders points the way to new standards of health and health care for the twenty-first century.

A vegan diet shouldn't be a cause of obsession: it should celebrate life and health. Such is the way that Victoria Moran looks at her food choices in The Love-Powered Diet, the story of how she chose healthy eating over trying to make herself feel good.

Of course, who and what we eat are profoundly political as well as psychological and ethical issues. Our need, if not obligation, to examine our food policies holistically is the core of Will Tuttle's The World Peace Diet, a powerful polemic on responsible eating.

For more information about World Food Day, click here.

The ancient Indian system of healing and medicine known as Ayurveda has proven effective in disease prevention and health creation for thousands of years and is becoming increasingly popular as a holistic alternative to conventional allopathic medicine.

Ayurvedic medicine works by enhancing the immunity of the individual through an analysis of the three body types: vata, pitta, or kapha. Maharishi Vedic Medicine is a revival of the most ancient Vedic wisdom of natural health care from India, the "Land of the Veda." The forty different treatment modalities of Maharishi Vedic Medicine are a comprehensive and holistic alternative medicinal approach to the prevention and treatment of all diseases and enliven and enhance all aspects of life.

The author, or co-author, of these books is Kumuda Reddy, MD, who has been practicing medicine for nearly thirty years. She completed her residency and fellowship at Mt. Sinai Hospital, New York and was the Medical Director of Maharishi Vedic Center in Bethesda, Maryland and a former faculty member of Albany Medical College. Dr. Reddy practiced Ayurveda full time for twelve years in Bethesda and in Falls Church, Virginia, before returning to India in 2008.

Through her practice, books and lectures, Dr. Reddy conveys this simple message, that "we are one with nature." Because of our intimate connection to nature and the entire cosmos, we need natural and holistic medicine. It is her belief that no other medicine has proven to be as natural, comprehensive, time-tested, and holistic as Ayurveda.

A Practical Peacemaker Ponders . . .

The latest nationwide adult obesity statistics were just released, and it's not a pretty sight. At first glance, my fellow residents of Colorado and I were glad to see our state once again recognized as having the lowest percentage of obese people of all the 50 states. But on closer scrutiny, it's alarming news for everyone. In these new statistics, Colorado is the only state with an obese percentage below 20%, and twelve states weighed in at 30% or higher. (Obesity is defined as a BMI of 30 or above.) Just fifteen years ago, no state had a percentage of 20% or higher! Obesity among children continues to increase as well.