The Singular Pilgrim: Travels on Sacred Ground
10 best books like The Singular Pilgrim: Travels on Sacred Ground (Rosemary Mahoney): What I Did On My Midlife Crisis Vacation, Teresa of Avila: The Progress of a Soul, The Gods Drink Whiskey: Stumbling Toward Enlightenment in the Land of the Tattered Buddha, The Bread of Angels: A Memoir of Love and Faith, No Place for a Lady: Tales of Adventurous Women Travelers, The Barn at the End of the World: The Apprenticeship of a Quaker, Buddhist Shepherd, Tide, Feather, Snow: A Life in Alaska, Cruelest Journey: Six Hundred Miles To Timbuktu, Crossing to Avalon: A Woman's Midlife Quest for the Sacred Feminine, Longing for Darkness: Tara and the Black Madonna
What I Did On My Midlife Crisis Vacation
Are you curious about spoon-bending, energy healing, communication with dead people, and the Big Picture of life? You're certainly not alone. This humorous, sassy and oh-so-honest memoir brings you along on a string of compelling adventures, ideologies and introspective moments in hot pursuit...
Author | Cathleen Medwick |
ISBN | 0385501293 |
A refreshingly modern reconsideration of Saint Teresa (1515-1582), one of the greatest mystics and reformers to emerge within the sixteenth-century Catholic Church, whose writings are a keystone of modern mystical thought.
From the very beginning of her life in a convent, following the...
Author | Stephen T. Asma |
ISBN | 0060834501 |
This is a great read that I stumbled upon while frittering time away on Amazon several years ago. Asma is a professor at Columbia College in Chicago and this book is an account of his year living in Phnom Penh, Cambodia teaching Buddhism to a group of Cambodian students. The book, though, is really about...
Author | Stephanie Saldana |
ISBN | 0385522002 |
A riveting memoir about one woman's journey into Syria under the Baathist regime and an unexpected love story between two strangers searching for meaning.
When Stephanie Saldana arrives in Damascus, she is running away from a broken heart and a haunted family history that she has crossed...
Author | Barbara Hodgson |
ISBN | 1580084419 |
While it's a noticeable improvement over my last attempt at reading a book about female travelers, No Place for a Lady still wasn't what I was hoping for.
My main disappointment was the book's superficial feel. Some of that likely has to do with its location-based organization, which turns...
Author | Mary Rose O'Reilley |
ISBN | 1571312544 |
Transcendence can come in many forms. For Mary Rose O’Reilley a year tending sheep seemed a way to seek a spirituality based not on “climbing out of the body” but rather on existing fully in the world, at least if she could overlook some of its earthier aspects. The Barn at the End of the World follows...
Tide, Feather, Snow: A Life in Alaska
Author | Miranda Weiss |
ISBN | 0061710253 |
Alaska is a place where know-how is currency and a novice's mistakes can kill you. An extreme landscape in both its beauty and challenges, the state is nicknamed "The Last Frontier" with good reason: Here is a paradoxical landscape where boundaries—between community and isolation, bounty and deprivation,...
Author | Kira Salak |
ISBN | 0792274571 |
After 37 years of never reading about Mali, I have managed two books about that country in the last month. The previous book (The Bad-Ass Librarians of Timbuktu: And Their Race to Save the World’s Most Precious Manuscripts) gave more information about the history of the region, and informed my reading...
Author | Jean Shinoda Bolen |
ISBN | 0062502727 |
A Midlife Quest For The Grail And The Goddess
Dr. Jean Shinoda Bolen's extraordinary memoir celebrates the pilgrimage that heralded her spiritual awakening and leads readers down the path of self-discovery. In this account of her journey to Europe in search of the sacred feminine, she unveils...
Author | China Galland |
ISBN | 0140195661 |
Read China Galland's posts on the Penguin Blog
With this book, China Galland brought increased attention to the spiritual traditions of the Black Madonna and other cross-cultural expressions of the feminine divine. The popularity of recent works by authors like Sue Monk Kidd and Kathleen...
Author | Amelia Earhart |
ISBN | 0609800329 |
Well, I'm not going to lie I was expecting the book to be a little more personable. It was a great book, but I wanted to know more of what she was feeling and even more about her relationship with her husband. I kept on trying to see if she were ever going to say that she missed him or thought about him from time...
Author | Sarahlee Lawrence |
ISBN | 0982569130 |
An exquisite blend of memoir and nature writing, River House is the story of a young woman returning home to her family’s ranch and building a log house with the help of her father. An avid river rafter, Sarahlee Lawrence grew up in remote central Oregon and, by the age of twenty-one, had rafted some of...
Author | Christiane Bird |
ISBN | 0671027565 |
Fusing travelogue, historical inquiry, and interviews with Iranians from all walks of life, Neither East Nor West is a landmark contribution to travel writing and to cultural studies, as well as a timely illumination of a nation deeply misunderstood by most Westerners. In describing life in Iran...
Author | Robert Kull |
ISBN | 1577316746 |
Years after losing his lower right leg in a motorcycle crash, Robert Kull traveled to a remote island in Patagonia’s coastal wilderness with equipment and supplies to live alone for a year. He sought to explore the effects of deep solitude on the body and mind and to find the spiritual answers he’d...
Author | Melissa Carroll |
ISBN | 1936740869 |
With candid, witty, and compelling experiences of yoga from renowned memoirists, including Cheryl Strayed (author of the number-one New York Times bestseller Wild), Claire Dederer (author of national bestseller Poser: My Life in 23 Yoga Poses), Dinty W. Moore (author of The Accidental Buddhist),...
Author | Julia Butterfly Hill |
ISBN | 0062516590 |
On December 18, 1999, Julia Butterfly Hill's feet touched the ground for the first time in over two years, as she descended from "Luna," a thousandyear-old redwood in Humboldt County, California.
Hill had climbed 180 feet up into the tree high on a mountain on December 10, 1997, for what she...
Author | Norman Lewis |
ISBN | 0786716878 |
While the rumblings of oncoming war shook a divided Spain, Norman Lewis and his brother-in-law Eugene Corvaja traveled through the Spanish countryside to the family tomb in Seville. Nearly seventy years later, in prose that is witty, understated, and poignant, Lewis describes the duo's travels...
Author | Sean Condon |
ISBN | 0864427816 |
I really wanted to like this book-- a lay-about ex-pat trying to make a go of it in Amsterdam? What's not to like? (It bears some resemblance to my life, after all!) But the stream of consciousness writing kept getting worse, more random and detached the longer it kept going. And by the end I was just relieved...
Author | Nick Danziger |
ISBN | 0586087060 |
This account describes the author's adventures during an 18-month journey "beyond forbidden frontiers" in Asia. With minimal equipment and disguised as an itinerant Muslim, he hitch-hiked and walked through southern Turkey, and the Iran of the Ayatollahs, entering Afghanistan illegally in the...
An Irreverent Curiosity: In Search of the Church's Strangest Relic in Italy's Oddest Town
Author | David Farley |
ISBN | 1592404545 |
A tour through the centuries and through a bizarre Italian town in search of an unbelievable relic: the foreskin of Jesus Christ. In December 1983, a priest in the Italian hill town of Calcata shared shocking news with his congregation: The pride of their town, the foreskin of Jesus, had been stolen....
The Crossing Place: A Journey Among the Armenians
Author | Philip Marsden |
ISBN | 0006376673 |
After centuries of prominence as a world power, Armenia has withstood every attempt during the 20th century to destroy it. With a name redolent both of dim antiquity and of a modern world and its tensions, the Armenians founded a civilization and underwent a diaspora that brought many of the great ideas...
Rag and Bone: A Journey Among the World's Holy Dead
Author | Peter Manseau |
ISBN | 0805086528 |
By examining relics—the bits and pieces of long-dead saints at the heart of nearly all religious traditions—Peter Manseau delivers a book about life, and about faith and how it is sustained. The result of wide travel and the author’s own deep curiosity, filled with true tales of the living and...
Fumbling: A Journey of Love, Adventure, and Renewal on the Camino de Santiago
Author | Kerry Egan |
ISBN | 0385507666 |
In the spirit of Kathleen Norris and Anne Lamott, Kerry Egan describes her journey from grief to faith in this candid, spiritually profound account of her pilgrimage on the Camino de Santiago, the medieval pilgrim route through Northern Spain.
Kerry Egan, a student at Harvard Divinity...
This Narrow Space: A Pediatric Oncologist, His Jewish, Muslim, and Christian Patients, and a Hospital in Jerusalem
Author | Elisha Waldman |
ISBN | 0805243321 |
A memoir both bittersweet and inspiring by an American pediatric oncologist who spent seven years in Jerusalem treating children--Israeli Jews, Muslims, and Christians, and Palestinian Arabs from the West Bank and Gaza--who had all been diagnosed with cancer.
In 2007, Elisha Waldman,...
Hillbilly Gothic: A Memoir of Madness and Motherhood
Author | Adrienne Martini |
ISBN | 0743272730 |
""My family has a grand tradition. After a woman gives birth, she goes mad. I thought that I would be the one to escape.""So begins Adrienne Martini's candid, compelling, and darkly humorous history of her family's and her own experiences with depression and postpartum syndrome.
Illuminating...