From the Publisher: North Atlantic's Top 16 Most Important Titles

Richard Grossinger, anthropologist, writer, and publisher of North Atlantic Books, is working on a history of the press. Here is a sneak preview, which outlines the 16 most important books published by North Atlantic.

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Our Sixteen Most Important (not Best-Selling) Books All-Time, publisher’s opinion only:

1. In Search of the Warrior Spirit: Teaching Awareness Disciplines to the Green Berets by Richard Strozzi Heckler. This title not only changed the way that the United States Army and Marines trained soldiers but provided an accessible model for using military forces constructively and compassionately across the Earth. This is where the Defense Department meets the Zen Center, the Buffalo Lodge, and the Aikido dojo.

2. Ayahuasca Visions: The Religious Iconography of a Peruvian Shaman by Luis Eduardo Luna and Pablo Amaringo. A horizontally super-oversize art book that reveals an undiscovered system of Amazonian art, metaphysics, healing, and soul transformation.

3. Healing With Whole Foods: Asian Traditions and Modern Nutrition by Paul Pitchford. Paul created a food-as-consciousness text for a generation (and those to follow) and awakened many people to the fact that food is spiritual practice, is meditation. For readers over the years HWWF has become a dietary and life bible.

4. Book of Theanna: In the Lands that Follow Death by Ellias and Theanna Lonsdale. The key flaw of life on Earth since the Ice Ages may be the artificial separation between its embodied and disembodied denizens, between the planet’s animals (including us primates) and its spirits, between its living and its dead. This book takes the first step toward excavating and healing that breach at its source.

5. Amazing Grace: The Nine Principles of Living in Natural Magic by David Wolfe and Nick Good. Here is the twenty-first century’s steersman’s (and steerswoman’s) handbook for how to be a superhero in a time of apocalypse. It contains indispensable principles for rebuilding and remarking the planet and for hope at the precipice of cataclysm and despair—and it is real, for anyone.

6. A Child’s Life and Other Stories by Phoebe Gloeckner. She is the most important and radical artist North Atlantic has launched—aesthetically and politically.

7. Maya Atlas: The Struggle to Preserve Maya Land in Southern Belize by the Toldedo Maya Cultural Council and the Toledo Alcaldes Association. This document essentially preserved traditional Mayan lands and enabled an unregistered nation of indigenous people to educate themselves on their own geographic legacy and cultural ground; to use the tools of modern technology to pass their knowledge and brief on to the world, the world’s courts, and their own future generations. The text was presented as a legal article to the Organization of American States and the United Nations. We are now attempting a similar project for the Northwest Territories of Canada tentatively entitled The Inuit Land Use and Occupancy Project and the Creation of Nunavut.

8. The Monuments of Mars: A City on the Edge of Forever by Richard C. Hoagland. Whatever else you may think of the dude, Hoagland changed forever NASA’s imaging priorities for Mars, while creating the first set of protocols for how to conceptualize extraterrestrial life outside a SETI model. He birthed a genre midway between astrobiology and science fiction.

9. Embryogenesis: Species, Gender, and Identity by Richard Grossinger. It was never just my book; it melds the collected wisdom of many biologists, osteopaths, and spirits who informed and educated me. This work deconstructs the underlying bias of scientistic biology and foreshadows a new phenomenological science yet to be born—a kinesis of morphology and consciousness. Embryos, Galaxies, and Sentient Beings: How the Universe Makes Life is a continuation of the same text.

10. Cell Talk: Talking to Cell(f) by John E. Upledger. If consciousness and intention can be packaged into psychosomatic sound bites, mutated effectively into unconscious spies, potentized thus, and delivered into cells and organelles, everything about medicine and health changes. Dr. John doesn’t mince words here or try to convince the unbelievers. He talks the talk as he walks the walk.

11. Hidden Casualties: Environmental, Health, and Political Consequences of the Persian Gulf War by Saul Bloom, John M. Miller, James Warner, and Philippa Winkler. You have to know that war is primarily about birds, bugs and worms in the soil, atmospheric carbon, water, cells, and genes, not Saddam Hussein, oil, jihad, tribal honor, or the Bush family.

12. Prisons: Inside the New America—From Vernooykill Creek to Abu Ghraib by David Matlin. When a society starts putting its arms and legs and half its youth behind bars and exports torture as a commodity, you know something has gone dreadfully wrong. This is the indictment.

13. Calm Healing: Methods for a New Era of Medicine by Robert Newman and Ruth Miller. These two wrote the textbook for twenty-second-century medicine—using mind, breath, yoga, and conscious movement not only to heal but to get to know your actual body (as opposed to the robot body of technological medicine)—your real phenomenological and somatoemotional soma and chakra-field with its secrets and intelligences. I consider this totally neglected classic the fundamental spiritual healing book of all time.

14. Cheng Hsin: Principles of Effortless Power by Peter Ralston. One could choose any of Ralston’s books for their blend of ontology and fighting, but this is the first and most basic of them, and it serves as a primer for an emergent field of human inquiry and practice—the real empirical martial arts.

15. Axial Stones: An Art of Precarious Balance by George Quasha. My old friend and nemesis GQ presents a syncretic mode of meditation and practice, which is also an artform with Stone Age implications, metaphysical overtones, and sculptural rigor. Where Lao Tzu meets Henry Moore, where the samurai and the poet join hands to make a single gesture, where aesthetics and science pull each other’s bow, where energy meets matter and both encompass “chi force,” George’s axial art rests in dynamic repose—and this book is its documentation and account.

16. The Alchemy of Healing: Psyche and Soma by Edward C. Whitmont. Whitmont, who during his life was a Jungian therapist as well as a homeopathic doctor, presents a very lucid proposition that healers, including M.D.’s project their own unconscious complexes, hexes, and unresolved conflicts onto their patients as well as their intended cures. Thus, the relative lack of personal development of a physician, and his unconscious ambivalence toward his role as the enemy of disease and death and the hero of modern science, may actually impede his treatments and graft new disease on his patients. Likewise, a spiritually developed doctor or shaman has a special power to heal beyond particular pharmaceuticals, herbs, or surgeries.

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