This insightful, easy-to-read handbook offers a non-traditional perspective on meditation. Written primarily for American insight meditation students, it delivers the Buddha's essential teachings clearly, straightforwardly, and without spiritual jargon, and helps make sense of practices often laden with traditional terminology. Practical explanations of the meditation process, its benefits and applicability to daily life, and warmly humorous advice and encouragement give new practitioners the help necessary to continue practicing meditation on a regular basis.

Buddha Takes No Prisoners, A Meditator's Survival Guide, Patrick Ophuls, North Atlantic Books, Paperback, 2007, 175 Pages, $17.95

Patrick Ophuls graduated in 1955 from Princeton University with a degree in Near Eastern area studies and obtained a PhD from Yale in political science in 1973. He joined the U.S. Foreign Service in 1959, was a political analyst on the Afghanistan desk at the State Department, and was also posted to American embassies in Abidjan, Ivory Coast, and Tokyo, Japan, as a personal aide to two ambassadors. Leaving the Foreign Service in 1967, he became a professor of political science at Northwestern University. Patrick Ophuls has practiced insight meditation intensively for over 30 years. He began sitting with the Thai teacher Dhiravamsa in 1974, graduating from his teacher training program in 1977 and going on to assist him during several retreats in 1978. He began studying with Insight Meditation Society founders Jack Kornfield, Joseph Goldstein and Sharon Salzberg in the late seventies, an association that continues to this day.