Author • Educator • Presenter
Commitment to human rights
Janet has a life long commitment to human rights. She is a teacher—in the broadest sense of the word—in all she undertakes. She enjoyed her time in the classroom with her students, and continues her work supporting activist causes. The third part of her life’s passion is writing. Currently she is contemplating two new book projects. She loves writing her blog and connecting with hundreds of people whom comment on the blog.
Books by Janet Levine
News Books Forthcoming 2022
Know Your Parenting Personality
Parenting Book
How To Use the Enneagram To Become The Best Parent You Can Be. Filled with practical advice taken from interviews with scores of parents and uses the e-model as a tool to improve family dynamics.
The Enneagram Intelligences: Understanding Personality for Effective Teaching and Learning
Educational Book
This book has helped thousands of educators to understand their motivations for how they teach and how their students learn. In 2000 it was nominated for the 2001 Grawemeyer Education Award. Translated into several languages it is now regarded as a “classic” work in Enneagram studies. Both these books are available in e-book formats
Inside Apartheid
Political Memoir
Bears witness to the horrors of living within the apartheid system from the perspective of a white activist. Levine, a crusading freelance journalist, was an elected public official, and she held office in many anti-apartheid organizations. She shares her love for the country as she fights against the tyranny of racism that tears at the lives of all South Africans. Inside Apartheid was reviewed in the New York Times Book Review, The New York Review of Books, Kirkus Review, et al.
Kirkus review: “A grim account by a white liberal South African expatriate of life “”in the belly of the beast”” that is apartheid. . . A compelling, chastening work.”
Leela’s Gift
Fiction
Janet’s latest book, a novel, “Leela’s Gift” (2009) is available at www.amazon.com and other online and brick bookstores. It describes a luminous inner journey that uncovers archetypal and highly relevant spiritual teachings including some of the secret teachings of Buddhism and the Enneagram. Among these are meditation and yoga practices, practical paths to freedom from the often dispiriting quality of our contemporary lives. “Leela’s Gift” intertwines modern philosophy and primal wisdom in telling a story as old as the human heart. You can read more about the novel and Janet’s work at www.leelasgift.com.
Updates & Writer’s Blog
JANET LEVINE BLOG: NYJB BOOK REVIEW: INNOCENTS AND OTHERS
In the novel the protagonists are professional filmmakers, women who know how to create illusions through a camera lens and peddle them as reality. Spiotti, perhaps, questions if fiction works the same way. Black marks on a white page or handheld reading device become an escapist reality as the neurons fire in our brains to link those black marks into an associative mélange of language, memory, and imagination.
JANET LEVINE BLOG: NYJB Book Review: More Was Lost
More Was Lost is a memoir of two parts; the first reads like a fairy tale and the second like a nightmare. Perényi’s coherently reassuring voice is simultaneously engrossing and intimate. Her memoir ranges from delightful detail to thought-provoking reflection. And all through the book her readers are aware of a sense of the historical relevance of her observations.
Janet Levine Blog: NYJB Book Review: Their Promised Land: My Grandparents in Love and War
Buruma explores with sensitivity questions of class, culture, and identity by looking at how his own grandparents lived as “outsiders who were insiders too.” As he writes, “Devotion to ‘the family’ was perhaps the most Jewish thing about them. The family offered safety, protection, and a refuge. It is a recurring theme in Bernard’s letters and intimately linked to his idea of a ‘haven’. . . . He cultivated a rather Victorian idea of domestic tranquility, a mixture of English coziness and German Gemütlichkeit, something Jews of a different class would have called heimisch.”
Janet Levine Blog: NYJB Book Review: Fragrant Palm Leaves: Journals, 1962–1966
The strength of the journals lies in Hahn’s honesty in his writing. The journal entries are not private musings but poignant and often powerful reflections, inspirational messages directed at his followers. A controversial figure in Vietnam as he went into to exile (for the first time) in May 1966, he wrote that he doubted if the collection would pass the censors. “If it can’t be published, I hope my friends will circulate it among themselves.”
Janet Levine Blog: NYJB Book Review: The Price of Salt: OR Carol
The novel is written entirely from Therese’s perspective, a single voice narrative style presently in vogue. We see Carol through Therese’s eyes, we share Therese’s introspection but not Carol’s, and yet Carol emerges as a fully developed character, complex and nuanced. Not only the lens of Therese’s perspective but also the dialog used as a literary device allows us to more fully grasp the coloring of Carol’s personality. Both what she says and how she acts carry layers of implicit meaning.
At first Therese grapples with trying to understand why falling in love with a woman is classified as distinct from falling in love with a man. (In 1952 such love was a taboo subject.) Each woman knows what she desires and while they dance around one another, neither knows the steps to manifest what she wishes.
Janet's work with the Enneagram:
What is Janet currently writing?
Non-fiction: READING MATTERS: How Literature Influences Life
By examining prominent texts, throughout history and from all parts of the world, readers will become more aware of how worldviews are created, developed, dissolved, and sometimes decimated…including their own.
(Work in Progress) Olivia's Ghosts
What is Janet currently reading?
Winter 2019
The Overstory by Richard Powers. I want to shout out loud from the roof tops , “Please read this novel.” Powerful! Compelling! Articulate! Engaging! Clearly, Richard Powers is firmly in the ranks of our foremost fiction writers in the English language—every book he’s written thus far is masterly. But, The Overstory is a masterpiece with the power to change one’s ideas forever on the current state of the world. This book is far more than about trees and forests and people; it is about the very essence of how we each conduct ourselves in the world. Five star recommendation. It has already won many Fiction Awards for 2018.
Summer 2019
Parisian Lives by Deidre Blair is a memoir by the best-selling author who won a National Book Award for her biography of playwright Samuel Beckett, among her many other biographies. The book chronicles ten years in Bair’s life when she moved from part time journalist and part time university lecturer to becoming one of America’s most able biographers and an Ivy League professor. The book has a distinct feminist flavor detailing Bair’s struggles in the patronizing and paternalistic worlds of publishing and academe. Extremely readable, you feel you know areas of Paris as well as she does and touching. See her description of Simone de Beauvoir’ funeral. Available in November 2019
Speaking Engagement Bookings
Janet Levine is a popular speaker in the areas of her expertise, among them, how reading great literature influences life, the Enneagram personality model, and the politics of past and present day South Africa that shape that country’s future. She also presents talks on writing and the writing process while sharing her experiences. In her presentations she uses her books, videos and additional material where necessary. Janet has presented these materials internationally at conferences and workshops across North America and beyond. She can shape her presentation to fit your needs. For an extensive listing of past speaking references CLICK HERE.
From Inspirational Faculty video, Milton Academy, 2018
Copyright © Janet Levine, All Rights Reserved, 2022