Excerpt from Books for Living by Will Schwalbe, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

In later life, Lin's finances would recover sufficiently to allow him to return to writing and scholarship. He would oversee the creation of the first major modern Chinese-­English dictionary, a mammoth task. And he would for a time live in Singapore, running the new National University there.

In the 1950s, Lin came back to New York and converted back to Christianity. He continued to live in New York with his wife and three daughters. In 1966, he moved to Taipei, where he died, age eighty, in 1976.

His youngest daughter describes his final years in Taipei as among his happiest. General Chiang Kai-­shek, the country's leader, had welcomed him warmly and even built a house for him according to Lin's own design; Madame ­Chiang was very fond of Lin Yutang and especially of Liao Tsuifeng, Lin's wife.

Chiang had also provided them with a chauffeur and maid (who also served as cook). The chauffeur and the maid fell in love, got married, and had a baby, whom Lin and Liao adored. Lin was working on his massive Chinese dictionary at the time. As his daughter describes, "my father would knock off work in the afternoon, and my parents would then go for a walk. And the way they did it was ideal: The chauffeur would drive them to a lovely, wooded road, and my parents would then have their walk, and the chauffeur would follow in his car. They would walk for exactly as long as they found pleasant; then hop in the car and be driven home."

Today, almost no one I know of any age outside of China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong has read anything by Lin Yutang or even heard of him. When I queried one of my aunts about him, though, she instantly recalled that he had been the speaker at her high-­school graduation, in New York, in 1936. She remembered just one piece of advice from his speech: he told the graduating class that, no matter what, they must travel—­whether they felt they could afford to or not.

If Lin sensed the urgent need to slow down in the 1930s, it's quite clear he would feel it even more today. And not just in America, where Lin lived when he wrote The Importance of Living, but in every industrialized country of the world.

Right outside my apartment is a pocket park. It's a tiny triangle, with a sculpture of a World War I doughboy in the center. For decades, it was just a little patch of concrete, but more recently the neighbors came together and created a lovely little garden there: a lushly planted mound of green surrounded by park benches. In the spring there is a bright bristle of tulips; in the summer, exotic native grasses; in the fall, a jack-­o'-­lantern festival timed with Halloween; and in all three of those seasons, the park is shaded by elegant mature trees that turn in late fall the glorious colors trees turn. Just the kind of place to sit and do nothing.

And yet, almost no one who sits there is doing nothing. Few people look at the sculpture or any of the plantings; what they look at are their hands—­or, rather, the phones cradled in their hands. They are texting, emailing, posting, pinning, tweeting, swiping.

And I must admit I am often one of them. We bring the hustle and bustle with us everywhere we go.

Sure, sometimes what I am texting about or photographing or pinning are the plants in front of me. I like to believe that when I pause and take a picture of one of the flowers in this pocket park, I'm seeing it differently, maybe appreciating it more, looking at it with the photographer's eye. That's true some of the time. But my thoughts swiftly leave the flower and go to where to send the photo or post it. While I'm doing that, I just sneak a look at others' postings, their parks and flowers and children. Oh, here's a snarky comment. I wonder what that's about? Soon I'm off, into the Internet, and out of my park—­getting amused or aggravated in a way that I could be anywhere. I want what Lin thinks I want—­to do nothing. Why should that be so hard?

Excerpted from Books for Living by Will Schwalbe. Copyright © 2016 by Will Schwalbe. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.