On The Road Less Traveled

'Life is difficult. This is a great truth, one of the greatest truths.' A timeless classic in personal development, The Road Less Travelled is a landmark work that has inspired millions. Drawing on the experiences of his career as a psychiatrist, Scott Peck combines scientific and spiritual views to guide us through the difficult, painful times in life by showing us how to confront our problems through the key principles of discipline, love and grace. Teaching us how to distinguish dependency from love, how to become a more sensitive parent and how to connect with your true self, this incredible book is the key to accepting and overcoming life's challenges and achieving a higher level of self-understanding.

A powerful story touched with family trauma, deprivation, and adversity balanced by a life of hard work and philanthropy! On the Road Less Traveled is the inspirational story of Edmund A. Hajim, an American financier and philanthropist who rises from dire childhood circumstances to achieve professional success and personal fulfillment. At age three, Hajim is kidnapped by his father, driven from St. Louis to Los Angeles, and told that his mother is dead. His father soon abandons him in order to seek employment—mostly in vain—leaving his son behind in a string of foster homes and orphanages. This establishes a pattern of neglect and desertion that continues for Hajim’s entire childhood, forever leaving its mark. From one home to another, the lonely boy learns the value of self-reliance and perseverance despite his financial deprivation and the trauma of being an orphan. As time passes, Hajim displays a powerful instinct for survival and a burning drive to excel. A highly motivated student and athlete, he earns an NROTC college scholarship to the University of Rochester; serves in the United States Navy; works as an application research engineer; then attends Harvard Business School, where he finds that the financial industry is his true calling. So begins his rapid ascent in the corporate world, which includes senior executive positions at E. F. Hutton, Lehman Brothers, and fourteen years as CEO of Furman Selz, growing the company more than tenfold. He also creates a happy and abundant family life, though he never forgets what it means to struggle. At age sixty, he is reminded of his painful past when a family secret emerges that brings the story full circle.

During a pivotal few months in the middle of the First World War all sides-Germany, Britain, and America-believed the war could be concluded. Peace at the end of 1916 would have saved millions of lives and changed the course of history utterly. Two years into the most terrible conflict the world had ever known, the warring powers faced a crisis. There were no good military options. Money, men, and supplies were running short on all sides. The German chancellor secretly sought President Woodrow Wilson's mediation to end the war, just as British ministers and France's president also concluded that the time was right. The Road Less Traveled describes how tantalizingly close these far-sighted statesmen came to ending the war, saving millions of lives, and avoiding the total war that dimmed hopes for a better world. Theirs was a secret battle that is only now becoming fully understood, a story of civic courage, awful responsibility, and how some leaders rose to the occasion while others shrank from it or chased other ambitions. "Peace is on the floor waiting to be picked up!" pleaded the German ambassador to the United States. This book explains both the strategies and fumbles of people facing a great crossroads of history. The Road Less Traveled reveals one of the last great mysteries of the Great War: that it simply never should have lasted so long or cost so much.

Peck's views on being a separate courageous individual.

The original The Road Less Travelledspent more than ten years on the bestseller lists and is one of the biggest-selling self-help books of all time. In this wonderfully wise and accessible sequel M. Scott Peck delves more deeply into the issues that confront and challenge all of us in the modern world: blame and forgiveness; sexuality and spirituality; death and the meaning of life; families and relationships; accepting responsibility and growing up. Writing throughout with insight and sensitivity, he draws on his own extensive experience -- both professional and personal -- to challenge false assumptions, suggest a way forward and demonstrate that personal change is always possible, no matter how difficult and complex the journey.

A cultural “biography” of Robert Frost’s beloved poem, arguably the most popular piece of literature written by an American “Two roads diverged in a yellow wood . . .” One hundred years after its first publication in August 1915, Robert Frost’s poem “The Road Not Taken” is so ubiquitous that it’s easy to forget that it is, in fact, a poem. Yet poetry it is, and Frost’s immortal lines remain unbelievably popular. And yet in spite of this devotion, almost everyone gets the poem hopelessly wrong. David Orr’s The Road Not Taken dives directly into the controversy, illuminating the poem’s enduring greatness while revealing its mystifying contradictions. Widely admired as the poetry columnist for The New York Times Book Review, Orr is the perfect guide for lay readers and experts alike. Orr offers a lively look at the poem’s cultural influence, its artistic complexity, and its historical journey from the margins of the First World War all the way to its canonical place today as a true masterpiece of American literature. “The Road Not Taken” seems straightforward: a nameless traveler is faced with a choice: two paths forward, with only one to walk. And everyone remembers the traveler taking “the one less traveled by, / And that has made all the difference.” But for a century readers and critics have fought bitterly over what the poem really says. Is it a paean to triumphant self-assertion, where an individual boldly chooses to live outside conformity? Or a biting commentary on human self-deception, where a person chooses between identical roads and yet later romanticizes the decision as life altering? What Orr artfully reveals is that the poem speaks to both of these impulses, and all the possibilities that lie between them. The poem gives us a portrait of choice without making a decision itself. And in this, “The Road Not Taken” is distinctively American, for the United States is the country of choice in all its ambiguous splendor. Published for the poem’s centennial—along with a new Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition of Frost’s poems, edited and introduced by Orr himself—The Road Not Taken is a treasure for all readers, a triumph of artistic exploration and cultural investigation that sings with its own unforgettably poetic voice.

'Life is difficult. This is a great truth, one of the greatest truths.' A timeless classic in personal development, The Road Less Travelled is a landmark work that has inspired millions. Drawing on the experiences of his career as a psychiatrist, Scott Peck combines scientific and spiritual views to guide us through the difficult, painful times in life by showing us how to confront our problems through the key principles of discipline, love and grace. Teaching us how to distinguish dependency from love, how to become a more sensitive parent and how to connect with your true self, this incredible book is the key to accepting and overcoming life's challenges and achieving a higher level of self-understanding.