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HOT SPRINGS: the true adventures of the first new york jewish literary intellectual in the human potential movement by Stuart Miller

HOT SPRINGS: the true adventures of the first new york jewish literary intellectual in the human potential movement

By

Pub Date: June 30th, 1971
Publisher: Viking

Another schlepp to the Big Sur? Another encounter with the encounter group? More potential or is it less by now in the human potential movement? Anyway, young Stuart is Jewish (a point he stresses), short, naive, and inexperienced -- well boyish -- with aspirations of a more cultured cosmos (New Yorker magazine or New England landscaped) and a strong desire ""to fuck,"" until now unrealized. He is part of the Residential Program and they're all there -- ""Abe"" Maslow and Bill Schutz and Fritz Perls but before long he is very disappointed in them. Then there are the sessions, fighting, crying, confessing and fucking before he learns that ""unbuttoning wasn't everything""; he leaves and goes back again and leaves again; his father finds him more of a mensch and so he returns this time with religion in mind and the Bible in hand thinking of himself as a ""Christian servant."" This is by no means as jazzy as the subtitle but there is the occasional funny line (""Natty Bumpo from the Lower East Side"") and it's quite personally initialed.