Babar's Yoga for Elephants (U)

Well before yoga became fashionable via Sting and Madonna, our friend Babar and all the residents of Celesteville were finding peace and tranquillity through yoga. And now elephants everywhere can join them! Through easy-to-follow instructions and step-by-step illustrations, Babar's Yoga for Elephants presents 15 positions and stretches as well as helpful breathing exercises. The book also provides useful advice on what to do with your trunk while in position, a dilemma that human yoga books often ignore. Written by Babar himself, the book explains how yoga was introduced to Celesteville and how he and Celeste keep fit doing yoga on their many travels. Babar's Yoga for Elephants is sure to become a classic for elephants as well as their human friends.The New YorkerCelebrity yoga has become its own industry, generating magazine covers, fashion lines, and now books. Christy Turlington, the limber supermodel and yoga-clothing designer, ambitiously combines memoir, historical survey, and instruction manual in Living Yoga. "I discovered that I could be graceful and agile and could hold my balance in challenging poses, both as a model and as a yogi," she writes. Two of Turlington's instructors, Sharon Gannon and David Life, showcase their own form in The Art of Yoga, in which philosophical aphorisms accompany glossy black-and-white photographs of seemingly impossible positions: in Dwi Pada Sirsasana, Life balances on his hands, hovering inches off the floor with ankles crossed neatly behind his head. Mariel Hemingway doesn't claim great feats of contortion in her memoir, Finding My Balance, but she credits yoga with sorting out her turbulent life. The suicide of her famous grandfather looms large, along with her mother's cancer, one sister's mental illness, the other's addiction, and Hemingway's own obsessive-compulsive behaviors. She writes, "I no longer feel a helpless victim of my family's strange interactions and flawed genetic pool." Even nonhuman celebrities have joined the act, albeit with less emphasis on spiritual redemption. Laurent de Brunhoff's Babar's Yoga for Elephants traces yoga back to prehistoric elephants (who, contrary to human custom, practiced with shoes on). The elephant king and his queen, Celeste, travel the world mimicking man-made structures with their asanas: "The Golden Gate Bridge? Two elephants doing the Cobra." (Andrea Thompson)