The Real Rasputin?
The story of Gregory Rasputin—the Siberian “mad monk,” healer, profligate, unwitting destroyer of the Romanov dynasty—is well known. He has been the subject of innumerable books and several films. Yet none of them seem to have fathomed him fully. His…
A Higher Power
In 1940, Bill Wilson, co-founder of Alcoholics Anonymous, a man who knew sin and failure like he knew the back of his hand, was living with his wife, Lois, in a tiny room at the Alcoholics Anonymous “clubhouse” in downtown…
Rated “Condemned”
We sat, unmoving, in the darkness of the movie theater as the first notes of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s overture played—a foreboding orchestra followed by sinister electric guitar. It was the rock opera Jesus Christ Superstar, and we had been forbidden…
Journey of the Rainbow Serpent
Oceans of time support the earth; and deep within this space-filled sea, in a moment as incredulous as one’s own birth, the universe began cooling. The genesis of everything had just begun, three-hundred-and-eighty-thousand years previously, in a feverish instant, and…
La Llorona
In the fall of 1988, I was given a second grant for two months at the Wurlitzer Foundation in Taos, New Mexico. The foundation owns several acres at the center of Taos, a few blocks from the Plaza. A dozen…