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

An obsession with states of grace--lost and regained--does not assure a person of finding grace, or happiness. What was it like to grow up as a son of the very avatar of the New Age? Ptolemy Tompkins's father, Peter, author of cult bestseller, The Secret Life of Plants, believed fervently that the fulfillment of lost and magical conditions were within one's grasp. In the first chapter of Paradise Fever, 13-year-old Ptolemy ponders life from the bottom of the family's swimming pool. His father has equipped him with scuba tank and regulator that may be of use on their upcoming expedition to the Caribbean to locate the lost continent of Atlantis. A naked woman appears above him. That would be Cheryl, a "changeling," one of many seekers of his father's wisdom. "In resolving to live a fuller, more realized life than he had before," Ptolemy writes, "my father was acting in the service of the spirit of the time--and the spirit of that particular time was very much a communal one. From about 1972 onwards, the Barn (one of Peter's laboratories) became a way station for an extraordinary array of self-styled seekers, finders, and aspiring awakeners of the slumbering modern world. Yeti hunters, psychics, free-form visionaries, and reincarnated Atlantean alchemists--one after another they showed up at our door ... "You might think that, to a child, this would be paradise. But as Ptolemy looks back, a single, disruptive event defines his childhood. One night, Peter brings socialite Betty Vreeland home to dinner, announcing that she will become part of the family unit. This is a fantastic and informative tour of the occult, the movements it sprang from and in turn inspired, and the shadows that darken paradise. Ptolemy Tompkins's memoir inevitably includes the carving of his father's grandiose dreams down to size.Read More