About the Author

Jeffrey J. Kripal is the J. Newton Rayzor Professor in and chair of the Department of Religious Studies at Rice University. He is the author of Kali's Child; Roads of Excess, Palaces of Wisdom; and The Serpent's Gift: Gnostic Reflections on the Study of Religion, all published by the University of Chicago Press.

Reviews

"The first all-encompassing history of Esalen: its intellectual, social, personal, literary and spiritual passages. Kripal brings us up to date and takes us deep beneath historical surfaces in this definitive, elegantly written book." - Playboy "Kripal tells the story of this beautiful retreat in California's Big Sur region - its history at once sexy, salacious, intellectual and political - with reverence and playfulness.... He is an engaging storyteller and Esalen a worthy subject (a kind of Us Weekly for the discerning intellectual)." - Publishers Weekly "An impressive new book.... Kripal has written the definitive intellectual history of the ideas behind the institute." - San Francisco Chronicle "Kripal examines Esalen's extraordinary history and evocatively describes the breech birth of Murphy and Price's brainchild. His real achievement, though, is effortlessly synthesizing a dizzying array of dissonant phenomena (cold war espionage, ecstatic religiosity), incongruous pairings (Darwinism, Tantric sex), and otherwise schizy ephemera (psychedelic drugs, spaceflight) into a cogent, satisfyingly complete narrative." - Atlantic Monthly"