| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 94.4

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 94.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Esalen: America and the Religion of No Religion. By Jeffrey J. Kripal. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007. xiv, 575 pp. $30.00, ISBN 978-0-226-45369-9.)
Esalen Institute of Big Sur, California, trod new cultural territory from its beginnings in the early 1960s. With its mind-altering drugs, nude baths and libertine sexual styles, utopian vision of human potential, and explosive encounter groups and gestalt sessions, it also promoted an expansive awareness of Asian spiritual models.	1
Until now Esalen has not had a comprehensive historical study—one that did not end with its early years. But how to construct a narrative about an institution that refused to act like one? How to write of a religiosity that proclaimed that it was no religion at all? To his credit, Jeffrey J. Kripal has managed the task definitively in a compelling narrative that explores themes at once celebratory, analytical, and critical.	. . .

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