Paradise Fever: Growing Up in the Shadow of the New Age

Rating:
Summary: Hilarious, haunting, and crazily balanced
Review: By turns hilarious and haunting, this memoir about growing up on the furtherest fringes of the New Age achieves a crazy kind of balance--a tilt-a-whirl balance. It's not a simply an expose of New Age self-absorption and infantilism (though it certainly is that). It's written by someone trying to make sense of his own wacky childhood experience, and trying to capture what was wonderful and not-so-wonderful about his fantastical father. What comes through is the author's basic sanity. The elder Tompkins is completely at home in the subterranean, labyrinthine byways of the occult. The author isn't--for all his drug and alcohol abuse, his feet are planted in this world. What struck me was how his feelings and attitudes and speculations about his father seemed so universal. Improbably, I saw my own, completely average, un-New Age dad in the elder Tompkins. The author gets at the essential mysteriousness of our fathers.

Rating:
Summary: Incredible Story
Review: My husband and I rarely like the same books, but we both loved this one--the most amazing story of a childhood like no other. Reading this book is a bit like watching a car wreck; you can't turn away. (That's a compliment, if you can't tell.)

Rating:
Summary: A great new-age bowel movement.
Review: There was something about the present new-age movement that always bothered me but I couldn't nail what it was; Ptolemy didn't have this problem and he articulates my sentiments perfectly. The final chapter was life-changing for me. eerie. real.

Rating:
Summary: A great new-age bowel movement.
Review: There was something about the present new-age movement that always bothered me but I couldn't nail what it was; Ptolemy didn't have this problem and he articulates my sentiments perfectly. The final chapter was life-changing for me. eerie. real.