Wednesday, June 30 at 5 p.m. PST, 8 p.m. EST
Blog talk radio interview with Jon Hansen

Wednesday, July 28 at 11 a.m. PST, 1 p.m. EST
Interview with Cheryl Benton and Debbie Zip
I will discuss Death by Supermarket and my upcoming book Survival Guide.

Thursday, July 22, 2010 at 1:30 p.m. PST, 4:30 p.m. EST
Radio interview with David Steinman
David is an environmentalist, consumer advocate, and author. I will discuss Death by Supermarket and my upcoming book Survival Guide.

Om Shanti,
Your girlfriend in health,

In Karma Meredith Fitzgerald clings to the Bhagavad Gita (the Hindu bible) as it is one of the only possessions she ends up with. She struggles to understand what has happened to her and examines the meaning of karma trying to decipher its true definition from the holy book. The over arching message of Karma is that sex slaves are not to blame and that society must stop condemning them and instead act righteously toward them with compassion and help.

I read this article about the new subway in New Delhi with great interest as I rode the trains for months all over India in 1968-69. Back then they were British made early 19th century steam locomotives. India was crowded and chaotic and poor back then, but my subsequent trips really drove home the message that India was going to crash and burn if something wasn’t done to at least move people around more efficiently.

The reason I like this article is because it talks about the Delhi Metro Rail Corporation’s managing director, 77-year old Elattuvalapil Sreedharan who handed out the Bhagavad Gita to his managing directors as a “management text.” In it, Lord Krishna, who is disguised as a chariot driver, convinces Arjuna, a brave but demoralized king that he “must do his duty against all odds, and fight even what seems to be an unwinnable war.”

Having seen the arguably unwinnable war of chaos in India and to read that they have a pristine subway now that runs at a profit, it seems that Mr. Sreedharan’s management style has won that unwinnable war.

In our own lives, we may not face something as heinous as my character Meredith does in Karma, but we have our own perceived unwinnable wars. And so the idea of approaching our lives with a management mentality—what can we do to do our duty (good/compassion/acceptance/perseverance) against all odds?

One thing we can do—and it’s free—is to have compassion toward those people in the world who are suffering at the hands of sex traffickers beginning with not condemning the street walkers in our own cities. Feeling compassion in your hearts is free, and it’s a great start in doing your duty toward your fellow human beings.

Om Shanti,
Your girlfriend in health,

Most famous for creating Holden Caulfield the freshly expelled prep school, malcontent student who embodied everyone’s teenage angst, beginning with the first sentence of The Catcher in the Rye, “If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you’ll probably want to know is where I was born and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don’t feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth.” From that sentence on, we were all hooked.

Salinger, like Howard Hughes was intent on fame before he got famous. In college (which he didn’t finish) he bragged about writing the great American novel. Once he did that—and changed the literary world forever—adulation followed him wherever he went. He grew to detest the limelight. He fled his Manhattan apartment and retired to a rural 90 acre farm in Cornish, New Hampshire. He gave his last interview in 1980, and was rarely seen in public.

Of course, my first question when I heard that Salinger had died was, “Had he kept writing, and would those manuscripts be published?” Recently it was announced in the press that Vladimir Nabokov’s (Lolita) wife intended to publish his last, unfinished manuscript even though he expressly told her not to if he died before finishing it.

The press is now leaking stories about Salinger, that there are no less than fifteen unpublished manuscripts moldering in a safe in his remote house.

No doubt publishers are salivating seeing as The Catcher in the Rye has sold more than 60 million copies and continues to sell 250,000 copies every year. So now we wait. Did Salinger order his manuscripts to be published after his death, or destroyed? Right now, no one knows.

Karma

The youngest attendee was the nine-year old author, Emma, who is pictured here as I shook her hand.  Tomorrow night is another event at the Morson Collection in Boston. You can listen to the two radio interviews I gave last night and this morning here.

I learned a lot from reading and rereading those letters. For a long time I thought I wasn’t destined to be a novelist, though I love writing fiction. I wrote a series of books in the health genre, books on weight loss, Chinese medicine, adrenal burnout, and my latest sole authored book Death by Supermarket: The Fattening, Dumbing Down, and Poisoning of America (no explanation needed, I assume).

But I still missed writing fiction. So I got out my draft and started working on it and a year later I was ready to shop it to publishers. The only problem was, as one editor put it to a friend of mine who was shopping his memoir, “. . . this is without question the absolutely worst time the publishing business has experienced since Gutenberg invented the printing press.” She went on to write, “Honest to God, the entire industry virtually imploded upon itself late last year and things continue to deteriorate, with every major house laying off dozens of employees and drastically reducing the number of books signed for publication.”

I could understand that. What really blew my mind though was editors at major publishing houses telling my agent, “We don’t read manuscripts on sexual slavery.”

Okay . . . why not? Because this is an important social issue, so why wouldn’t a publisher want to at least look at a book with an urgently important social message?

It was after hearing many variations on that theme that I decided to self publish.