A highlight of this past weekend at Book Expo America was the announcement of the 2009 Nautilus Book Award gold winners. The Nautilus Book Award recognizes books and audio books that promote spiritual growth, conscious living, and positive social change, and stimulate the imagination and inspire the reader to new possibilities for a better world. Sounds True is proud to announce two books that received this honor, both of which connect the topics of science and spirituality:
Winning gold in the parenting/family category is Building Emotional Intelligence: Techniques to Cultivate Inner Strength in Children by Linda Lantieri, with introduction and practices guided by Daniel Goleman. In the introduction chapter, Goleman writes “Brain science tells us that a child’s brain goes through major growth that does not end until the mid-20s. Neuroplasticity, as scientists call it, means that the sculpting of the brain’s circuitry during this period of brain growth depends to a great degree on what a child experiences day-to-day. During this window these environmental influences on brain growth are particularly powerful in shaping a child’s social and emotional neural circuits. Children who are well-nurtured and whose parents help them learn how to calm down when they are upset, for instance, seem to develop greater strength in the brain’s circuits for managing distress.
“When children do not have strategies for decreasing their anxiety, less attention is available to them to learn, solve problems, and grasp new ideas. A child, for example, who gets panicked by a pop quiz, will actually imprint that response rather than the details of any material in the quiz. Distress kills learning. Scientists now believe that improving attention and memory, along with freeing the mind from impulsivity and distress, puts a child’s mind in the best zone for learning. And social and emotional learning does just that…Linda has developed a curriculum that can help any child calm the body, quiet the mind, and pay better attention.”
Read more about Linda Lantieri’s book and her work on teaching students to manage stress in an interview on Edutopia.org in August 2008.
Gold winner in the category of cosmology / new science is Measuring the Immeasurable: The Scientific Case for Spirituality, an anthology featuring: Daniel Goleman, Bruce H. Lipton, Candace Pert, Gary Small, Jeanne Achterberg, Lynne McTaggart, Dan Siegel, Andrew Newberg, Peter Levine, Larry Dossey, Gregg Braden, Robert Emmons, Peter Russell, James Austin, Marilyn Schlitz, Dean Radin, Cassandra Vieten, Tina Amorok, William Tiller, Susanne C. Segerstrom, Rick Hanson, Les Fehmi, Jim Robbins, Charles Tart, Owen Flanagan, Dawson Church, Sandra Ingerman, Stanley Krippner, Garret Yount, Sara Warber, Katherine N. Irvine, Joan H. Hageman, and Ian Wickramasekera.
“Measuring the Immeasurable introduces readers to this new field of inquiry through the writings of forty-three different scientific researchers, journalists, healers, and visionaries,” writes Sounds True publisher and founder, Tami Simon, in her introduction to the anthology. “Our hope is that it furthers the dialogue in this important new area of inquiry, utilizing the best of our scientific measuring tools to deepen our understanding of what matters most—our moment-to-moment connection with each other and the wholeness of life.”
Follow the links above to see the press kits and excerpts for these books, both published in 2008.
Nautilus Book Awards silver and gold winners are selected in a three-tier judging process by experienced teams of book reviewers, librarians, authors, editors, book store owners, and leaders in the publishing industry. Learn more about the Nautilus Book Awards, organized by Marilyn Maguire. Visit the Nautilus Book Awards Gold Winners announcements page.
