‘”Your guide will probably tell you,” Ezekiel said, “that the name Kilimanjaro comes from kilima, the Swahili word for ‘mountain’ and jaro, the Maasai word for ‘snow-capped.’ But that’s just for the tourists. We Chagga people who have always lived here, we believe the name comes from our own language: kilema-kyaro, which means ‘Impossible to Climb.’”’

So begins Buddhist writer Tim Ward’s latest book, ‘Zombies on Kilimanjaro,’ an intriguingly and perhaps misleadingly titled memoir about climbing the highest freestanding mountain in the world with his 20-year-old son, Josh.

It’s a good beginning, plunging the reader straight into the ‘plot’ of …

Tim Ward, author of What the Buddha Never Taught, says young adults should spend time learning what is meaningful to them alone

If you’re looking for the meaning of life, you’ll benefit from seeking it out yourself, said author Tim Ward, who spent time in a Buddhist monastery in Thailand in the 1980s.

“I think it’s really valuable for everybody, preferably in their 20s, to really come up against the question, ‘Where does meaning reside,’ ” Ward said. “I think that there is an answer, and that is that part of what it is to be human is to generate meaning.

Ward wrote about his experiences in What the Buddha Never Taught, which …