Unfortunately, we refuse to grasp life's sad realities and grow a more practical mentality accordingly. Despite our recurring disappointments and sufferings, we do not realize the pressure we are putting on one another with our naive views about life, mostly about an elusive happiness. We do not feel or admit that only by helping one another less selfishly, we might bear life's hardships together a bit easier. No one can elude, or do any-thing about, life's severe limitations in our wicked society, but only grasp and accept them with grace. Hence, it seems too idiotic and pathetic when we...

Over 900 facts, trends, and choices about relationships in this book demonstrate the difficulty of satisfying this simple human need in the new era. They show the main sources of relation-ship conflicts and the consequent, rising personal frustration and depression. With our bizarre perceptions and values about relationships, we have indeed gotten ourselves trapped in an agonizing web of complex dilemmas. As societies get more complex every day, our lifestyles and convictions have changed drastically. Accordingly, our relationships have become too difficult to understand and manage. Our...

Darren Durant returns to Vancouver in 1988 after living in Tehran for three years and coping with the chaos of the Iran-Iraq war, including nightly missile attacks. He is now determined to establish himself as a painter and find a dependable companion. He had traveled to Iran after an agonizing separation from his beloved wife, Erica. Even the sacrifice to abandon his artistic life and work in Erica's flourishing software company as a computer technician had not saved their marriage. A particular canvas he had painted in 1985 at the shores of the Caspian Sea keeps wreaking intricate emotional...

This novel is about a young boy's perplexing journey through adolescence in a corrupt, fast-changing environment of Iran during the last years of the Shah's regime. The playful, overly curious Kian Noori is anxious to solve several mysteries regarding his parents' history and lifestyle amidst the showy aristocratic society of Iran before the Islamic revolution. Then his life is turned upside down when a gypsy arrives at their home to tell his mother's fortune. He is not only mesmerized by her charm, but also perturbed by her peculiar predictions of his future and her warning about an ominous...

Over the last few decades, we have developed wrong perceptions about the nature of love and the purpose of relationships. With drastic changes in social values and lifestyles, our expectations from relationships have skyrocketed in line with our escalating personal aspirations. However, all these idealistic needs have only led to more distress for everybody. The rising divorce rate and endless family conflicts reflect the hectic environment of relationships. These facts also reveal that our present methods of dealing with relationship hurdles have failed. While focusing on the symptoms of...

Soon we should agree that humans' natural qualities do not match their common (idealistic) perception of themselves, and that this mental incongruity accounts for most of our personal and interpersonal problems. In addition, the characteristics of the environments we have gradually built around ourselves make it impossible for us to converge with either our natural or idealistic view of a human. Nevertheless, it seems as if we must face the same old cliche, 'Who are we?' even more seriously now, in order to detect the origin of our personal and social problems. Our findings would then make us...

This trilogy raises many unsettling questions about life and the dilemmas of living. We humans (our spirits in fact) seem determined to resolve all those mysteries like a sacred mission embedded in our psyche. Obviously, the main question is about the creation of this incredibly complex, yet orderly universe. We like to rely on logic and mathematics to explain this amazing phenomenon, but more crucially, understand humans' imaginary importance in the midst of this horrendous creation. To do so, we apply common sense, philosophy, psychology, theology, and other disciplines to come to terms...