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Another quality book-release by TheManBy many recommended as a must-readhttp://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0394404289/ref=cm_cr_pr_pro…242(!!!) RATINGS, 5 STARS ON AMAZON reviewshe Prophet is a book of 26 poetic essays written in English in 1923 by the Lebanese artist, philosopher and writer Khalil Gibran. In the book, the prophet Almustafa who has lived in the foreign city of Orphalese for 12 years is about to board a ship which will carry him home. He is stopped by a group of people, with whom he discusses many issues of life and the human condition. The book is divided into chapters dealing with love, marriage, children, giving, eating and drinking, work, joy and sorrow, houses, clothes, buying and selling, crime and punishment, laws, freedom, reason and passion, pain, self-knowledge, teaching, friendship, talking, time, good and evil, prayer, pleasure, beauty, religion, and death. One of Gibran’s best known works, he followed it with The Garden of The Prophet, and was due to produce a third part when he died.Quote:     5.0 out of 5 stars The book of reminders, November 25, 2007By Kiki “Kiki” (New York) – See all my reviewsKahlil Gibran writes in so few words that which each of us knows deep down in our conscience, but forget from time to time as we become consumed by the chaotic discourse of life. I pick up this book anytime I feel the need to shift my perspective from one of confusion and anger to one of love and peace.Quote:   16 of 20 people found the following review helpful:5.0 out of 5 stars Beauty, August 11, 2000By Earl Hazell (New York) – See all my reviews(TOP 1000 REVIEWER)   Can anyone say that which hasn’t been said about this masterpiece?”Your children are not your children… they are the children of life”… “Your joy is your sorrow unmasked”…In a world where people have endeavored to write tomes of self-help books and quasi-philosophical poetry in the hopes of it having one tenth the power, artistry, and spiritual healing power of but one of the lines of his they quote (see his quotes among the likes of everyone from M. Scott Peck to John Bradshaw, to Iyanla Vanzant, and God knows who else); in a world where just the mentioning of his name can have you looked upon questioningly, as if you should be too busy living in his world or graduating from his school of thought/artistry to bring him up to those self-thought to be equally or somehow more “sophisticated”; in a world where “genius” and “soul” and “poet” are words alternately overly and improperly used, rendering them into trivial vestiges of the superlatives of an earlier time, Kahlil Gibran’s work, as if from the pen of Tammuz and Christ themselves, dances and redances into the spirit of our lives. This was my mother and father’s favorite book of all time when I was a child, and I felt closer to them the more I read and grew to understand it. This is the work that under no uncertain terms taught me the power of the written word, and the glory of the sacred calling of poetry to the poet- and to the human heart. As I look back on my artistic and spiritual life, I remember reading Nietzsche’s ALSO SPRACH ZARATHUSTRA and some of the Dialogues of Plato, and seeing some of his influences. I remember reading THE BROKEN WINGS and SPIRITUAL SAYINGS- treasured books of his in my father’s collection- and feeling his messages leap off the page. I even remember the first public poetry reading of my work- in the same Church in the Village in New York where he first read from THE PROPHET more than seventy-five years earlier. And yet I cannot pretend at any given time in my life now or in the future (as if I’d ever want to) that I could ever outgrow the majesty of his words, his style, his teachings- his heart- as displayed so simply, sublimely and majestically in this book of the ages.Nothing about our present day world, from the art to the entertainment to the literature to the technology to the cynicism, could actually spoil one from appreciating this piece of literature. Only the feeling that it could could prevent one from actually experiencing this work; the thought that, because his messages and artistic prose regarding the highest truth and the greatest love have been so unconsciously incorporated into the lexicon of our modern, quasi-spiritual times, that he isn’t saying anything we haven’t already heard. Given that he wrote this book so many decades ago, perhaps today (in that context) he isn’t. Do not be surprised, however, if your soul actually HEARS it all for the first time when you read this book.Kahlil Gibran’s THE PROPHET is a beautiful book of poetry.Kahlil Gibran’s THE PROPHET is a beautiful, beautiful, book of poetry.Nothing more, nothing less.