Goodbye Bolinas We Ll See You Again

It's a summer in the sixties near a small coast side town in California. A man who has taken on the name of Shiva is driving north on Highway 1 when he picks up two young women hitchhikers in his VW van. They stop and hike to an overlook of the Pacific Ocean where they are enveloped in fog and one of the women disappears. In an incredulous daze they travel on until they reach Bolinas. The town already has an influx of bohemians and bikers and has a colorful past. After a concert in the local community center Shiva reluctantly takes on the mantel of the next enlightened master. The word spreads and Bolinas becomes a turbulent, fantastic and ecstatic place. Unfortunately Shiva cannot escape his past and in a number of hallucinations he struggles with his inner doubts and the world's problems. Eventually a man comes into Bolinas looking for his lost wife. The situation that arises requires Shiva, as well as his followers, to confront themselves and behold unforeseen consequences.

Two brothers travel through stories that define their lives - from a fairy tale to a future world. One is tying to evade his past while the other is trying to confront it. Emotional and historical memories merge as they journey through a labyrinth of different times, places and characters...

Includes index.

The Long Goodbye: Dementia Diaries discusses a disease that is both personal and social for more than five million patients and their families and friends in the United States today. Now that there are medical strategies for preventing and/or curing strokes, heart attacks, even cancer, many more people are going to live into the dementia years in the near future. Although many dementia horror stories circulate in conversation and in the media, they are not the whole story. Creative approaches to loving a dementia patient can make for a valuable learning experience for family and caregivers. In The Long Goodbye Margaret Miles describes her commitment to making--rather than passively suffering--her spouse's dementia experience. Family and friends who accompany patients find embedded in the experience moments of great beauty, hilariously funny incidents, new companions, and life insights. The narrative provides both a travelogue and suggestions for a richly meaningful life passage for all participants. The Long Goodbye seeks to supply a balanced picture of a disease usually represented as unmitigated loss.

When Lily Dunn was just six years old, her father left the family home to follow his guru to India, trading domestic life for clothes dyed in oranges and reds and the promise of enlightenment with the cult of Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh. Since then he has been a mystery to her. She grew up enthralled by the image of him; effervescent, ambitious and elusive, a writer, publisher and entrepreneur, a man who would appear with gifts from faraway places, and with whom she spent the long, hot summers of her teenage years in Italy, in the company of his wild and wealthy friends. Yet he was also a compulsive liar, a delinquent, a man who abandoned his responsibilities in a pursuit of transcendence that took him from sex addiction, via the Rajneesh cult, to a relentless chase of money, which ended in ruin and finally addiction to alcohol and prescription drugs. A detective story that charts two colliding narratives, Sins of My Father is a daughter's attempt to unravel the mysteries of a father who believed himself to be beyond reproach. A dazzling work of literary memoir, it asks how deep legacies of shame and trauma run, and if we can reconcile unconditional love with irreparable damage.

-Recommended by Kirkus Reviews "A philosophical story of growth, insight, and discovery . . . which offers rich food for thought long after Jay’s story concludes.” —Diane Donovan, California Bookwatch Ten months—that’s how long twenty-six-year-old writer and aspiring actor Jay Sakovsky decides to stay and teach in the bohemian beach town of Soul City, California, to save up cash and overcome his anxiety before moving on to Hollywood. But after several “friendly chats” with the vice principal about hangover sweats and black eyes from barroom brawls, Jay sees a therapist who helps him connect his self-destructive tendencies and artistic blocks to his undiagnosed OCD, setting him on a ten-year healing journey that drives him to near madness as he explores the limits of his heart, creativity, and psyche. A surreal, darkly comic, and psychologically epic novel, The Soul City Salvation explores mental illness, friendship, aging, masculinity, modern love, the creative process, spiritual awakening, and fighting for respect in an uncaring world. *The Soul City Salvation is the fifth book in a loosely-linked series, with Hammond, The Summer of Crud, Understanding the Alacrán, and Developing Minds: An American Ghost Story as books one-four. Each novel can be read independently of the others.