This is a book that all truth seekers should read for its remarkable insight. Phil Cousineau makes us aware - through stories and quotes from wise teachers and from Phil's own inner Wiseman - that everything that happens in our life is part of our own story, which is also a part of the stories of others. Through these stories, we are linked to each other and to the universe. In trying to understand their significance, which sometimes seems to be meaningless, we find that all deep stories have a secret power and many can't be reduced to a single meaning. For a simple explanation, we can look at the quoted words of Tai chi master, Sat Hon, "Storytelling is the ancient art of communicating wisdom."

Art critic John Berger's says that great stories not only reveal presences, but also suggest absences. Cousineau ties into this distinction the difference between what happens in a story and what it means. As an example of this analysis, Cousineau asks us to imagine a world with fire and then to imagine a world without it. We find, with reflection, that fire is both literal and symbolic. He also quotes Carl Jung who warned, "Never say just a symbol."

The delightful little book is filled with so many wonderful, insightful quotes such as G.K. Chesterton's observation that myths, legends and fairy tales are more than true, "Not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us that dragons can be beaten." Cousineau concludes, "We are seized by stories when we can so deeply identify with them that time stops, space disappears, and we fall like skydivers into those places between the words, and we and the story are one." To me, this explains it all -- what stories are about and many moments in life as well.

"If you're training to be a pilot, you spend time in a flight simulator." From this quote of Keith Oatley's, professor of cognitive psychology at the University of Toronto, Cousineau concludes, "stories may act as 'flight simulators' for social life, providing a kind of training, testing or rehearsal, for real life, for future situations."

We learn that stories satisfy the hunger of the spirit. Cousineau quotes Studs Terkel, the famous journalist-historian, who said, "People are hungry for stories. It's part of our very being." One key idea derived from a story of the Seneca people called, "The Storytelling Stone," is that by being in touch with what is human also puts us in touch with what is inhuman. The quoted Essayist Susan Griffin says a good story reveals the unknown and admits of other possibilities.

We find that stories are true although they may have never happened. The Seneca story and others of this kind, Cousineau says, reveal a universal nameless emptiness that can be thought of as hunger: the hunger for good, which satisfies the body; the hunger for stories, which satisfies curiosity; and third, the hunger for a gift, which, particularly hints at our longing for another world.

Without stories, we learn from Cousineau, there would only be a world of hard facts, a world suspicious of awe and wonder, art and poetry and of any expression that defies rational explanation.

Phil Cousineau has done it again! He is continually pushing the envelop in finding interesting topics to scrutinize. Just a few months after getting "Long Live Our Stories" launched (see review in New Perspectives magazine on line) Cousineau releases Word Catcher. This is a book for wordsmiths of many varieties but, in particular, writers, crossword puzzle and Scrabble players, and teachers who need to motivate their reluctant learners to further explore our language.

The name "word catcher" brings to mind the Native American concept of "dream catcher." Only, in this case, we embark upon a magical journey reading how cruise began as a term for a pirate attack or how the cuss word damn relates to farthing. Perhaps you will find a word that you never heard of before but could figure out from its spelling, such as daymare or find a word whose meaning has changed over time, such as saunter. At the end of our journey, we find that truly we have caught the meanings of many words - 250 words in fact.

For those readers who may not be familiar with Phil Cousineau, he is an award-winning writer, filmmaker, scholar, teacher and travel leader. Currently, he is the host of Link TV's "Global Spirit" television series. He has published 26 nonfiction books and has 15 scriptwriting credits.