Books published by 1st World Publishing

Bonus offer: Free ebook ...and talk to the authors.Over 110 color images.~~~~ The origin of Vedic painting is as old as time itself. In the earliest writings of ancient Indian civilization, 7000 years ago, we find records of the practice of Vedic painting. Vedic painting requires that the artists devote themselves fully in expressing their individuality within the guidelines of specific cognitions inspired by ancient sages and kept alive through an oral tradition within the family lineage.Today there are only a handful of artists throughout India who still strive for so exalted a vision of perfection, avoiding the more lucrative path of commercialism. ~~~~ Few living have witnessed the great treasures of India. In modern times, her majesty has become obscured even to her native sons and daughters. Although in her long and varied history she has known more golden ages than any country of our earth, poor journalism and modern media have fooled us into believing that India is a broken, impudent country characterized by poverty, starvation, and corruption.~~~~ This is true in part, but by looking between the cracks, it is impossible to miss the fundamental footprints of Indian majesty. They lay just beneath the surface squalor of it's daily life and reveal a heritage of infinite complexity and sophistication. In her past, India's character has been shaped by such abundance and freedom that all the great leaders and conquerors of history have marveled at her material wealth and metaphysical wisdom.~~~~~ During the early 1990s Nandini Badhwar and Rodney Charles traveled throughout India, navigating a course bound to understand the principles of the world oldest painting techniques. In the end, they barely scratched the surface of an ancient school of art that is as fundamentally transcendent as the human soul. This modest presentation is as much a memoir for the authors as it is an introduction to a greatly under-investigated goldmine of human culture and development.~~~~ The authors are happily married and love to walk and ride their bikes in the Iowa countryside. "India is the cradle of the human race, the birthplace of human speech, the mother of history, the grandmother of legend, and the great grandmother of tradition. Our most valuable and most instructive materials in the history of man are treasured up in India only." ~ Mark Twain"India conquered and dominated China culturally for twenty centuries without ever having to send a single soldier across her border." ~Hu Shih Ambassador of China to USA"If there is one place on the face of the earth where all the dreams of living men have found a home from the very earliest days when man began the dream of existence, it is India." ~Romain Roland"We owe a lot to the Indians, who taught us how to count, without which no worthwhile scientific discovery could have been made." ~Albert Einstein

Wings and Wildlife in the Wetlands is a collection of powerful wildlife images that portrays the peace and serenity inherent in the wetlands. With each photograph, Annette Boelk presents her interpretation of the wild in order to educate about the habitat, survival skills, and unique beauty of the wetland creatures. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Annette Boelk, born in Fond du Lac, Wisconsin, is a freelance wildlife photographer who captures her visions of God's creations in nature through a camera lens. Wings and Wildlife in the Wetlands is the result of prayer, patience, and over 8 years of capturing and compiling images. The book is accompanied by a photography display called "Wisconsin Wings and Wildlife," and is exhibited for art shows and in art galleries in Wisconsin. ~~~~~~~~~~ Annette Boelk's range of work in wildlife, richly represented here, includes notable images that have been used in books, newspapers and magazines, and purchased at art shows and galleries.

"It's terrible, / getting what you want, / because that's when you know you'll always want / something different" confesses the speaker in Cradling Monsoons with a fabulously poignant bravado that keeps the reader tractor-beamed in thrall and enthralled within the light of these smart, funny, heartbreakingly gorgeous poems. Opening with a poem about a father who "cut down his family tree / to build a bridge from Kokomo to San Francisco that's still burning," the speaker in Sarah McKinstry-Brown's poems conversely puts down roots and stays for the birth of a first child whose arrival sets the city of everything she knew before on fire. Curbing her own impulses for wanderlust and fire-starting, she instead stands squarely within the blaze that is motherhood and family-that cycle of immolation, flame, ash, and rekindling-in poems that gracefully shape shift between the different, conflicting identities contemporary women embody: daughter, lover, mother, artist. These poems make art from life, and reveal the making and living of life as an art of terrible power and tenderness. These poems are pure muscle, fierce heart. -Lee Ann Roripaugh, Author of On the Cusp of a Dangerous YearThe poems in this stunning first collection are "accessible" in the best sense of that word, in the sense that Stephen Dunn's, Dorianne Laux's, and Ted Kooser's are. The subjects come mostly from everyday life-Picture Day at school, a Folgers commercial, comfort food, December in Omaha, "the Tall, Blonde-haired, Blue-eyed, Smart, Talented Woman who Keeps Hitting on my Husband" -in which the poet discovers the extraordinary. The lines seem like intense conversation, but they are, at the same time, deeply engaging poetry that shows a mastery of sound and rhythm and a gift for creating fresh, radiant metaphors. I'm reminded of how great dancers and acrobats must learn to move in a way that looks natural and effortless. Or, as Pope put it, "True ease in writing comes from art, not chance,/As those move easiest who have learned to dance." Like our best poets, Sarah McKinstry Brown has learned. -William Trowbridge, Author of Ship of FoolHeaven, the black keys on a grand piano! This collection pits tension between reality and desire, cultivating a world rich with lived imagination. In Sarah McKinstry-Brown's grasp, language tackles the world of marriage, pregnancies and family with a complex love capable of cradling frustrations and grief with a patience that can ride through any monsoons and still trust there will be air to breathe soon enough. -Lisa Gill, Author of Mortar & Pestle and The RelentingBIO:Winner of the Academy of American Poets Prize, Sarah McKinstry-Brown studied poetry at the University of New Mexico, the University of Sheffield, England, and the University of Nebraska. In 2004, she won the Blue Light Poetry Prize for her collection When You Are Born and has since been published everywhere from West Virginia's

Lisha Adela García's splendid debut full-length collection of poems, Blood Rivers, follows the legacy of blood-spilled, spared, reviled, holy, singled-out, intermingled, and sustaining. These are poems of cultural border crossings and personal boundary breaches as seen from the female perspective. Her "whole life is the geography between...two countries, two cultures, two languages," the Rio Grande, "hugging both sides" of her story. She envisions her "long black tongue, a computer / chewing the lessons of history." The poems can be scathing, calling us out for our absurdities, as in "St, Francis in Mesilla" where we hear how "War tames the sassy wildness of the rich / who justify themselves later by becoming Buddhists / who sell meditation tapes." And these poems can also be gentle, calling out to our best selves, as in "Quizás" where we hear "Love is a waltz / starving death for a moment." This collection speaks to the challenges of our blended native, Spanish, colonist, immigrant North American culture in the way Neruda's Canto General spoke to Chile's challenges. Lisha Adela García tells us "Women are doors". Allow this woman poet's voice to open into you like a door to your heart and be your guide along treacherous Blood Rivers. You will find her to be a compass of lavender / sage and a new breeze."-Lana Hechtman Ayers, author, publisherLisha Adela Garcia's poems in Blood Rivers are deeply rooted in land and language, in heartbreak, paradox and celebration. Like a prophet of old, she asks what "remains of your belly of mercy?" Then she draws us into that mercy, with poems whose embrace is wide, whose magic is real, whose language is vivid and rich. Gateways and ghosts, generations of women, socks, snails, history, heaven and other "puzzles of the sky"-these poems are "not enslaved to the linear," but rather full of mischief, ancient wisdom and generosity. In English mostly, but with a Spanish soul, this is a work of vision, urgent and compelling. --Betsy Sholl "How do we know the stars / within us are not dark / wings from a dead moon," Lisha Adela García asks in Blood Rivers, Poems of texture From the Border, a superb first book that wrestles with this question in a series of poems that balance on the borders, the margins of geography, history, culture and psychology. It is at these borders that she can exchange selves and possibilities, speaking at various times as a priestess atop Chi Chen Itza, Lot's wife, or even as a bull in the ring in the book's final, sweeping poem. Haunted by death and violence, the speaker in these poems keeps defining herself by her ability to empathize and thus transcend margins that have separated the present and history, myth and reality, Mexico and the States, the living and the dead, the domestic and political, and the result is an important vision of and for our times. As she herself says, " My history is stored in the eaves / of the houses where I have slept." -Richard Jackson

Sometimes, luck finds us when times are worst. In the middle of August, terribly hot in the Darfur region of Sudan, Africa, there lived two lucky brothers, Luis Carmono and Ulysses Delmar, who owned nothing whatsoever. Luis and Ulysses lost their parents to terror attacks, but never once did they complain for more than what they had. They sang together every day, and at night, they slept in peace looking forward to tomorrow.THE MUSICIANS OF DARFUR follows the life two unlikely heroes who charmed millions with their natural gifts. ~~~ Proceeds from the sale of this book are sent to:The HELP SUDAN FUND founded by the LOSTBOYS OF SUDAN whose goal is to provide foodand water to children in Darfur and to build schoolsto educate the uneducated.Programs include recruiting school administration,integrating community involvement, providingfunding to teachers and administrators, constructingschool buildings, and drilling water wells for theschool campus.

Imagine what it would be like for the human spirit to experience, embrace and be transformed by that Universal Love that created the entire universe. Is that Divine Love trying to get humanity's attention during these turbulent days?_____________________________________________________In this national award-winning book, Nancy Clark lovingly opens her heart to share the Light's message of love and hope for humanity and to tell us there is indeed a transcendent component to the human experience.In the early 1960s Nancy died during childbirth, had a near-death experience and experienced the Light's immense love for her. She wanted to remain with the Light forever, but returned from Heaven's door and woke up in the morgue. In 1979, her soul was "invited" once again by the Light to enter more deeply into the realm of the Sacred, an experience so profound that nothing is ever the same again. This "near-death-like" experience proves there are many triggers for the release of the soul to transcend the physical dimension and enter into the Ultimate Reality. Coming close to death is only one trigger. What happens to you during the experience is what matters, not what brings you into it.The implications of what Nancy has to share with us are immense. Our indestructible spiritual nature is revealed with clarity about life's existential questions: Who am I, why am I here, Is there a God? Hear His Voice will bring new radiations of Light to the reader coming from the original Source. It can change your life! With a foreword written by Kenneth Ring, PhD Professor Emeritus, Psychology, University of Connecticut Author, Lessons From the Light