Author: Benjamin Lorr
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
ISBN: 1250017521
Category : Health & Fitness
Languages : en
Pages : 322
Get Book Here
Book Description
Author Benjamin Lorr wandered into a yoga studio—and fell down a rabbit hole Hell-Bent explores a fascinating, often surreal world at the extremes of American yoga. Benjamin Lorr walked into his first yoga studio on a whim, overweight and curious, and quickly found the yoga reinventing his life. He was studying Bikram Yoga (or "hot yoga") when a run-in with a master and competitive yoga champion led him into an obsessive subculture—a group of yogis for whom eight hours of practice a day in 110- degree heat was just the beginning. So begins a journey. Populated by athletic prodigies, wide-eyed celebrities, legitimate medical miracles, and predatory hucksters, it's a nation-spanning trip—from the jam-packed studios of New York to the athletic performance labs of the University of Oregon to the stage at the National Yoga Asana Championship, where Lorr competes for glory. The culmination of two years of research, and featuring hundreds of interviews with yogis, scientists, doctors, and scholars, Hell-Bent is a wild exploration. A look at the science behind a controversial practice, a story of greed, narcissism, and corruption, and a mind-bending tale of personal transformation, it is a book that will not only challenge your conception of yoga, but will change the way you view the fragile, inspirational limits of the human body itself.
Author: Benjamin Lorr
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 0553459406
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 352
Get Book Here
Book Description
In the tradition of Fast Food Nation and The Omnivore's Dilemma, an extraordinary investigation into the human lives at the heart of the American grocery store What does it take to run the American supermarket? How do products get to shelves? Who sets the price? And who suffers the consequences of increased convenience end efficiency? In this alarming exposé, author Benjamin Lorr pulls back the curtain on this highly secretive industry. Combining deep sourcing, immersive reporting, and compulsively readable prose, Lorr leads a wild investigation in which we learn: • The secrets of Trader Joe’s success from Trader Joe himself • Why truckers call their job “sharecropping on wheels” • What it takes for a product to earn certification labels like “organic” and “fair trade” • The struggles entrepreneurs face as they fight for shelf space, including essential tips, tricks, and traps for any new food business • The truth behind the alarming slave trade in the shrimp industry The result is a page-turning portrait of an industry in flux, filled with the passion, ingenuity, and exploitation required to make this everyday miracle continue to function. The product of five years of research and hundreds of interviews across every level of the industry, The Secret Life of Groceries delivers powerful social commentary on the inherently American quest for more and the social costs therein.
Author: Stefanie Syman
Publisher: Macmillan + ORM
ISBN: 1429933070
Category : Health & Fitness
Languages : en
Pages : 399
Get Book Here
Book Description
In The Subtle Body, Stefanie Syman tells the surprising story of yoga's transformation from a centuries-old spiritual discipline to a multibillion-dollar American industry. Yoga's history in America is longer and richer than even its most devoted practitioners realize. It was present in Emerson's New England, and by the turn of the twentieth century it was fashionable among the leisure class. And yet when Americans first learned about yoga, what they learned was that it was a dangerous, alien practice that would corrupt body and soul. A century later, you can find yoga in gyms, malls, and even hospitals, and the arrival of a yoga studio in a neighborhood is a signal of cosmopolitanism. How did it happen? It did so, Stefanie Syman explains, through a succession of charismatic yoga teachers, who risked charges of charlatanism as they promoted yoga in America, and through generations of yoga students, who were deemed unbalanced or even insane for their efforts. The Subtle Body tells the stories of these people, including Henry David Thoreau, Pierre A. Bernard, Margaret Woodrow Wilson, Christopher Isherwood, Sally Kempton, and Indra Devi. From New England, the book moves to New York City and its new suburbs between the wars, to colonial India, to postwar Los Angeles, to Haight-Ashbury in its heyday, and back to New York City post-9/11. In vivid chapters, it takes in celebrities from Gloria Swanson and George Harrison to Christy Turlington and Madonna. And it offers a fresh view of American society, showing how a seemingly arcane and foreign practice is as deeply rooted here as baseball or ballet. This epic account of yoga's rise is absorbing and often inspiring—a major contribution to our understanding of our society.
Author: Sasha Brown-Worsham
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 0757320619
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 320
Get Book Here
Book Description
My mother used to chant in Sanskrit in her study before sunrise every morning. Though she died when I was 16—22 years ago—I always hear her voice that way. Off-key, but strangely hypnotic, the language both complicated and pure, reverberating around our house. For a kid growing up in Southern Ohio — Bible belt country — the sound was both alluring and repellent. "What's your mother doing?" my friends would ask. "Being a weirdo," I told them. And so encapsulates the coming of age story of Sasha Brown, a transplanted tween plunked in the middle of the Bible Belt with a macrobiotic hippy mom and a ribs-eating dad. A writer whose work has appeared in The New York Times, Redbook, and Cosmopolitan, Brown's prose is heartfelt and hilarious, revealing her quest to find her way as two worlds collide. While other moms were at Bible study, her mom was studying Sanskrit; while other were finding friendship at Tupperware parties, her mom was finding enlightenment at the ashram. And when her mother was diagnosed with breast cancer, she chose a healthy diet and yoga over aggressive chemo. When her mother died, Brown ran as far away from yoga as she could until a running injury left her needing the very thing she was running from. It was there—on the mat—that she processed her grief and found her mother again. As she went deeper into the poses, she discovered she was more like her mother than she thought. Through it all, she found a deeper understanding of the practice, of the breath, and of the life her mother lost too young. The practice that once seemed easy and slow compared to pounding the pavement in a new pair of Asics became the biggest challenge of her life. She learned that yoga is so much more than asana. So much more than breath. So much more than perfect poses. The "union" of yoga became one of heart and mind, and finally, with that maternal energy Sasha had been missing for so many years. In the space that she focused her mind and pushed her body to its breaking point was where she would see her mother. In the space of her yoga mat, she and her mother connect across time. Namaste the Hard Way is an ode to the timeless bond between mothers and daughters. Plucky and poignant, Namaste the Hard Way is for anyone who didn't want to walk in their mother's shoes (or sandals).
Author: William J Broad
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1451641427
Category : Health & Fitness
Languages : en
Pages : 338
Get Book Here
Book Description
The Science of Yoga draws on a hidden wealth of science, history, and surprising facts to cut through the fog that surrounds contemporary yoga and to show - for the first time - what is uplifting and beneficial and what is delusional, flaky, and dangerous. At heart, it illuminates the risks and rewards. The book takes the reader on a whirlwind tour of undiscovered yoga that goes from old libraries in Calcutta to the world capitals of medical research, from little-known archives to spotless laboratories, from sweaty yoga classes with master teachers to the cosy offices of yoga healers. In the process, it shatters myths, lays out unexpected benefits, and offers a compelling vision of how to improve the discipline.
Author: Naomi Klein
Publisher: Macmillan
ISBN: 9780312203436
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 520
Get Book Here
Book Description
"What corporations fear most are consumers who ask questions. Naomi Klein offers us the arguments with which to take on the superbrands." Billy Bragg from the bookjacket.
Author: Carl G. Jung
Publisher: Bantam
ISBN: 0307800555
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 433
Get Book Here
Book Description
The landmark text about the inner workings of the unconscious mind—from the symbolism that unlocks the meaning of our dreams to their effect on our waking lives and artistic impulses—featuring more than a hundred images that break down Carl Jung’s revolutionary ideas “What emerges with great clarity from the book is that Jung has done immense service both to psychology as a science and to our general understanding of man in society.”—The Guardian “Our psyche is part of nature, and its enigma is limitless.” Since our inception, humanity has looked to dreams for guidance. But what are they? How can we understand them? And how can we use them to shape our lives? There is perhaps no one more equipped to answer these questions than the legendary psychologist Carl G. Jung. It is in his life’s work that the unconscious mind comes to be understood as an expansive, rich world just as vital and true a part of the mind as the conscious, and it is in our dreams—those personal, integral expressions of our deepest selves—that it communicates itself to us. A seminal text written explicitly for the general reader, Man and His Symbolsis a guide to understanding the symbols in our dreams and using that knowledge to build fuller, more receptive lives. Full of fascinating case studies and examples pulled from philosophy, history, myth, fairy tales, and more, this groundbreaking work—profusely illustrated with hundreds of visual examples—offers invaluable insight into the symbols we dream that demand understanding, why we seek meaning at all, and how these very symbols affect our lives. By illuminating the means to examine our prejudices, interpret psychological meanings, break free of our influences, and recenter our individuality, Man and His Symbols proves to be—decades after its conception—a revelatory, absorbing, and relevant experience.
Author: Suzanne Morrison
Publisher: Crown
ISBN: 0307717445
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 354
Get Book Here
Book Description
What happens when a coffee-drinking, cigarette-smoking, steak-eating twenty-five-year-old atheist decides it is time to get in touch with her spiritual side? Not what you’d expect . . . When Suzanne Morrison decides to travel to Bali for a two-month yoga retreat, she wants nothing more than to be transformed from a twenty-five-year-old with a crippling fear of death into her enchanting yoga teacher, Indra—a woman who seems to have found it all: love, self, and God. But things don’t go quite as expected. Once in Bali, she finds that her beloved yoga teacher and all of her yogamates wake up every morning to drink a large, steaming mug . . . of their own urine. Sugar is a mortal sin. Spirits inhabit kitchen appliances. And the more she tries to find her higher self, the more she faces her cynical, egomaniacal, cigarette-, wine-, and chocolate-craving lower self. Yoga Bitch chronicles Suzanne’s hilarious adventures and misadventures as an aspiring yogi who might be just a bit too skeptical to drink the Kool-Aid. But along the way she discovers that no spiritual effort is wasted; even if her yoga retreat doesn’t turn her into the gorgeously calm, wise believer she hopes it will, it does plant seeds that continue to blossom in surprising ways over the next decade of her life.
Author: Benjamin Lorr
Publisher: Macmillan
ISBN: 031267290X
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 322
Get Book Here
Book Description
Lorr explores the fascinating, often surreal world of Bikram Yoga, a style taught to millions by a very living guru, Bikram Choudhury. Bikram Yoga is distinguished by the extreme heat it is practiced in, an overt focus on pain, and the materialism of its founder.
Author: Pepe Karmel
Publisher: The Museum of Modern Art
ISBN: 9780870700378
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 288
Get Book Here
Book Description
Published to accompany the exhibition Jackson Pollock held the Museum of Modern Art, New York, from 1 November 1998 to 2 February 1999.
