ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON’S ETHICS FOR RASCALS

In 1879, RLS traveled across ocean and plains from Scotland to rescue the woman he loved -- and to become Monterey’s first Bohemian writer of note. (RLS defined 'the true Bohemian, a creature lost to view under the imaginary Bohemians of literature,[as one who] lives wholly to himself, does what he wishes, and not what is thought proper ... works at what he believes he can do well and not what will bring him in money or favour. You may be the most respectable of men, and yet a true Bohemian.') This book not only tells how the magnificence of the Big Sur-Monterey coast altered his life and transformed his spirit, it resonates with Stevenson’s “Hints for Glad Living”.

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DOING IT WITH THE COSMOS: Henry Miller’s Big Sur Struggle for Love Beyond Sex

Henry Miller’s involvement with the Big Sur wilderness transformed a near-manic preoccupation with sex into a transcending love affair with ‘the face of the world as the Creator intended it to look.’ Convinced that merely earning a living in cities was not living, he put down roots on this coast and lived serenely, despite troubles with women. This book details the progression of Miller’s spiritual odyssey from Brooklyn to Paris, through Greece to Big Sur, and, eventually, to Los Angeles where, in the midst of urban chaos, he continued to feel free and centered -- a conjugate citizen of the cosmos.

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SHEPHERDS OF PAN ON THE BIG SUR-MONTEREY COAST

SHEPHERDS OF PAN ON THE BIG SUR-MONTEREY COAST is a medley of lively, literate essays about the Nature wisdom linking some unlikely bedfellows: Robert Louis Stevenson, Gertrude Atherton, Jack London, Robinson Jeffers, Jaime de Angulo, John Steinbeck, Eric Barker, D. H. Lawrence, Henry Miller and others, with a pertinent postscript on William James, father of American psychology. All these luminaries came to perceive divinity in the awesome, double-dealing power of Nature, symbolized by the Greek god Pan. Many became pantheists, or nature mystics, under the spell of the alternately soft and violent landscape of California´s central coast. The book is a multicolored meditation on a deeply rooted -- and often overlooked -- human need to reconnect with Nature, wellspring of our inner joy and psychic wholeness.

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TRAVELING BACKWARD: Curious Journeys and Quixotic Quests Beyond the Youth of Old Age

TRAVELING BACKWARD is a highly original philosophic romp beyond the youth of old age with a quixotic ‘journalist turned mom turned academic turned peasant.’ It’s a kind of lighthearted guide to the wisdom of the ages—from Socrates to existentialism and beyond—gleaned during a struggle to recover the images that first touched her heart and to answer two questions: Who am I really? Where does the world come from? It’s a colorful, occasionally poignant, journey that could help you look at life through the reverent eyes of a child again.

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BEYOND SURVIVAL: The Art of Being Fully Human

BEYOND SURVIVAL: THE ART OF BEING FULLY HUMAN: This gigantic book (almost two inches thick!) is about everything that can make an individual life worth living, beyond what it takes to make a living. It’s an overall education in The Humanities, a compilation of what Monterey Peninsula College professors, Elayne Wareing Fitzpatrick and Sidney Ramsden-Scott, considered the best of selected editions of Janaro and Altshuler’s classic text, The Art of Being Human. The book is designed to whet individual appetites for exploring the wisdom of the ages by stressing the importance of thinking critically about value choices in philosophy, psychology, ethics, religion, mythology, love, the arts (theater, music, dance, literature, art), personal creativity, and our connections with nature, the sciences, and technology). Included are pertinent Supplemental Readings from Fitzpatrick’s files of the past three decades.

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