Senior business leaders to junior employees-everyone is seeking balance, meaning and joy in their career and life. Rather than faddish corporate fluff, Build Your Castles in the Air provides a business improvement philosophy ringing true to the soul, resonating with values inherent in us all. Author Chuck Hansen applies quotes from Henry David Thoreau's timeless masterpiece Walden to the most vexing dilemmas of the 21st Century corporate world, and adds reflections from Hansen's own experiences, in national politics, Fortune 500 companies, living in the Caribbean and crossing the North Atlantic in a sailboat. The whole is a simple yet powerful reference tool, containing enduring wisdom, humor, hope, and, moreover, a means to integrate purpose, integrity and authenticity into modern life. "I love Thoreau and I especially love this inspirational treatment of his work." -Dr. Wayne Dyer NY Times #1 best-selling author "Read this book and bring balance and genuine success-the type that truly matters-into your life." -Honorable Susan Molinari Former member of Congress "Build Your Castles in the Air is a rich reflection and dialogue vehicle for enhancing a sense of purpose, strategy, mission or corporate responsibility." -Victoria Guthrie Senior fellow, Center for Creative Leadership

Castles in the Air is a beautifully written, autobiographical story of rescuing an ancient mansion. Gwydir Castle was inhabited by ravers and rats until Judy Corbett and her husband Peter Welford found and acquired this 500-year-old house mouldering in the foothills of Snowdonia. Despite the toads, strange smells and squatters, they decided to mortgage themselves to the hilt to bring the castle back to life. This is an evocatively written and genuinely moving book and is infused with an extraordinary sense of place. The couple's adventures in a gothic wonderland lead them through plots both supernatural and historical. In a museum storeroom in a Bronx warehouse they find a missing room, in the castle's Solar Tower the ghost of a young woman appears and from the far edges of the woods a silent man called Sven emerges to befriend the couple and their beloved castle. For everyone who has ever wanted to live in a glorious house or escape from the mundanity of life - Castles in the Air is pure magic.

This personal growth book is a guide on how to make your dreams come true. Packed full of tips & techniques including metaphysical and spiritual tools to give you that competitive edge in the big, wide world and set you on the path to success. Your dreams are in the palm of your hand Are you ready to make them happen?

p.B. J. Whiting savors proverbial expressions and has devoted much of his lifetime to studying and collecting them; no one knows more about British and American proverbs than he. The present volume, based upon writings in British North America from the earliest settlements to approximately 1820, complements his and Archer Taylor's Dictionary of American Proverbs and Proverbial Phrases, 1820-1880. It differs from that work and from other standard collections, however, in that its sources are primarily not "literary" but instead workaday writings - letters, diaries, histories, travel books, political pamphlets, and the like. The authors represent a wide cross-section of the populace, from scholars and statesmen to farmers, shopkeepers, sailors, and hunters. Mr. Whiting has combed all the obvious sources and hundreds of out-of-the-way publications of local journals and historical societies. This body of material, "because it covers territory that has not been extracted and compiled in a scholarly way before, can justly be said to be the most valuable of all those that Whiting has brought together," according to Albert B. Friedman. "What makes the work important is Whiting's authority: a proverb or proverbial phrase is what BJW thinks is a proverb or proverbial phrase. There is no objective operative definition of any value, no divining rod; his tact, 'feel, ' experience, determine what's the real thing and what is spurious."

Three narratives, set in the fifth, fourteenth, and twentieth centuries, all revolving around an ancient text and each with a love story at its centre, are the elements of this brilliantly ingenious novel, a follow-up to the international bestseller An Instance of the Fingerpost. The centuries are the 5th (the final days of the Roman Empire); the 14th (the years of the Plague — the Black Death); and the 20th (World War II). The setting for each is the same — Provence — and each has at its heart a love story. The narratives intertwine seamlessly, and what joins them thematically is an ancient text — “The Dream of Scipio” — a work of neo-Platonism that poses timeless philosophical questions. What is the obligation of the individual in a society under siege? What is the role of learning when civilization itself is threatened, whether by acts of man or nature? Does virtue lie more in engagement or in neutrality? “Power without wisdom is tyranny; wisdom without power is pointless,” warns one of Pears’s characters. The Dream of Scipio is a bona fide novel of ideas, a dazzling feat of storytelling, fiction for our times.