Esalen

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.

"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"