Book excerpt: In 1924, at the age of eleven, Fritz Peters first met Gurdjieff, the great master who introduced the West to the teachings of the Fourth Way. This hardcover volume brings together all three of Peters' books on Gurdjieff for the first time. Boyhood with Gurdjieff covers Fritz Peters' time as a young troublemaker at Gurdjieff's Institute in Fontainbleau, France. Gurdjieff's unconventional yet strangely logical behavior made him the only adult who made sense to Fritz Peters. In a series of brilliantly told anecdotes, Peters relates Gurdjieff's impromptu and surprising responses to the day-to-day problems of the Institute. In Gurdjieff Remembered, Peters describes his adult encounters with Gurdjieff from 1932 to 1947. As an adult, Peters is more circumspect about Gurdjieff, but Gurdjieff still makes a huge impression on him as a man who lives in the present, heedless of the opinions of others. Peters' third and final book about Gurdjieff, the rare Balanced Man, which has never before been published in the USA, looks back at the previous two books, and to the future of Gurdjieff's teaching.