Sailing Home: Using Homer's Odyssey to Navigate Life's Perils and Pitfalls

by Norman Fischer

Book Overview

In the tradition of How Proust Can Change Your Life, this work reveals the universal lessons and profound personal guidance within Homer's classic Greek epic, The Odyssey. This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1416560211
• ISBN13: 9781416560210
• Release Date: June 2008
• Publisher: Free Press
• Length: 234 Pages
• Weight: 0.88 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 5.8" x 8.7"

Customer Reviews

A gem!

Sailing Home is a beautifully written, elegant and eye-opening guide to navigating "life's perils and pitfalls". Norman Fischer provides a wise, kind, and candid interpretation of Odysseus's journey home. While this journey, as written by Homer, is laden with masculine sensibility and challenges, Fischer's guidance, infused with Buddhist wisdom and practice, makes the journey accessible to all. (Ah -- but to hear this story from Penelope's perspective!) With unflinching acceptance for the human condition, Fischer's Sailing Home allows the reader to appreciate the restless, circuitous, courageous, and perilous journey we all must make to find our way home to ourselves.

A Modern "Classic"

Norman Fischer has written a "classic" commentary on The Odyssey. What I mean by "classic" is that it is one of first rank as Norman Fischer makes Odysseus' journey of almost a generation ours. With heartfelt prose, Mr. Fischer shares his experience as someone deeply immersed in his Buddhist tradition to find his way home. Not preachy, through the travails of Oddysseus, Mr. Fischer offers a way to show the readers how to reconsider what it means to live a good life, to ask the right questions and give due care to those we love. I wished the book went on and on after I finished it. In graceful ways, Mr. Fischer shows us how to separate the wheat from the chaff in our lives. I wish him many more books to write which are as conversational and as learned as this book.

A wonderful journey to oneself

I found this book to be one of the most enjoyable and life changing moments in my life. I was so engaged and intrigued by the premise and the easy way Norman Fischer was able to convey his profound understanding of the human condition. The honesty and integrity of his experiences are so wonderfully shared through the trials and tribulations from Homer's Odyssey as the ground for our personal work. It is a book that you just want to savor every word. Besides, at the end of each chapter are wonderful guided meditations.

life's journey

I definetely recommend this book. He uses examples from Zen Buddhism, Greek mythology, Judaism, and Christianity to emphasize the kind of struggles many have to face in life and how to deal with those struggles. So he's really a very open-minded person.

Sailing Home is like fresh air...

Norm Fischer is a heartful, compassionate teacher with a great gift for expressing his and our human beingness...I've been carrying Sailing Home around with me for several weeks, cherishing the gift of his awareness and experience as a person...a person who has immersed himself in the practice of meditation, Buddhist, Judaic, Christian teachings and life itself. He is a very intelligent person who can bring even Homer's Odyssey down home in a valuable meaningful way using metaphor so that even I am understanding it. I am grateful that this book came my way. Blessings for your journey home. Joan Fenold