Books with author Christopher Isherwood

Ever since he was a geckling, P.D. Puddleskipper dreamed of exploring the world just beyond the Kapok tree. For P.D. life was more than simply gathering grubs and lounging about in the sun like other geckos. Life was an adventure! But not until a terrible metal beast attacks the Emerald Forest does he finally get his chance. Piloting his latest invention, an airship called the Puddlejumper, P.D. leads his friends, fellow lizard Flora Springtail, a tree frog named Blinky, and a sleepy tree sloth named Waffles on an incredible journey in search of a new home. Join the crew of the Puddlejumper as they bravely venture forth across the Emerald Forest, battling sticky-fingered fruit bats and slippery snakes, exploring far-away places, looking for lost treasure, and making new friends along the way. From Way-Up peak to the Rollie-Roo River, the Cave of Song to the Great Kapok Tree, P.D. and his friends learn the value of friendship through their exciting adventures.

My Guru and His Disciple is a sweetly modest and honest portrait of Isherwood's spiritual instructor, Swami Prabhavananda, the Hindu priest who guided Isherwood for some thirty years. It is also a book about the often amusing and sometimes painful counterpoint between worldliness and holiness in Isherwood's own life. Sexual sprees, all-night drinking bouts, a fast car ride with Greta Garbo, scriptwriting conferences at M-G-M, intellectual sparring sessions with Berthold Brecht alternated with nights of fasting at the Vedanta Center, a six-month period of celibacy and sobriety, and the pious drudgery of translating (in collaboration with the Swami) the Bhagavad-Gita. Seldom has a single man been owed with such strong drives toward both sensuality and spirituality, abandon and discipline; out of the passionate dialectic between these drives, My Guru and His Disciple has been written.