shopping cart
Save up to 30% on our Staff Picks
Call us:  800-878-7323 HELP
McAfee SECURE helps keep you safe from identity theft, credit card fraud, spyware, spam, viruses and online scams.
Original Essays | September 23, 2009

Jonathan Lethem: IMG Stops: On Those Things My New Novel Forgot to Be About, Maybe



For me, there's a weird, unfathomable gulf — I almost wrote gulp — between the completion of a novel and its publication. Some days this duration feels interminable, as though the book has... Continue »
  1. $19.56 Sale Hardcover add to wish list

    Chronic City

    Jonathan Lethem

Ships free on qualified orders.
Add to Cart
$13.95
New Trade Paper
Ships in 1 to 3 days
Add to Wishlist
Qty Store Section
18 Local Warehouse Biography- Religious
7 Remote Warehouse Sports and Fitness- Water Sports

More copies of this ISBN:

This title in other formats:

West of Jesus: Surfing, Science, and the Origins of Belief

by Steven Kotler

West of Jesus: Surfing, Science, and the Origins of Belief Cover

Synopses & Reviews

Publisher Comments:

A spiritual and scientific surf quest, West of Jesus tracks a contemporary surfing myth and looks at the neuroscience that connects spirituality and high risk sport.

 

After spending two years in bed with Lyme disease, Steven Kotler had lost everything: his health, his job, his girl, and, he was beginning to suspect, his mind. Kotler, not a religious man, suddenly found himself drawn to the sport of surfing as if it were the cornerstone of a new faith. Why, he wondered, when there was nothing left to believe in, could he begin to believe in something as unlikely as surfing. What was belief anyway? How did it work in the body, the brain, our culture, and human history?

 

Into this mix came a strange story. In 2003, on a surf trip through Mexico, Kotler heard of “the conductor,” a mythical surfer who could control the weather. He’d heard this same tale eight years earlier, in Indonesia, but this time something clicked. With the help of everyone from rebel surfers to rocket scientists, Kotler undertakes a three year globetrotting quest for the origins of this legend. The results are a startling mix of big waves and bigger ideas: a surfer’s journey into the biological underpinnings of belief itself.

About the Author

Steven Kotler’s novel The Angle Quickest for Flight was a San Francisco Chronicle bestseller and won the William L. Crawford IAFA Fantasy Award. His nonfiction has appeared in the New York Times Magazine, GQ, National Geographic, Details, Wired, Men’s Journal, Maxim, Salon, and elsewhere. He has surfed all over the world and lives in Los Angeles, California.

Product Details

ISBN:
9781596913448
Subtitle:
Surfing, Science, and the Origins of Belief
Author:
Kotler, Steven
Publisher:
Bloomsbury Publishing PLC
Subject:
Religious
Subject:
Water Sports
Subject:
Sports - General
Subject:
General Sports & Recreation
Publication Date:
May 2007
Binding:
Paperback
Language:
English
Pages:
261
Dimensions:
824x660x71 54

Other books you might like

  1. $8.95 Used Trade Paper add to wish list
  2. $15.95 New Trade Paper add to wish list
  3. $8.95 Used Trade Paper add to wish list
  4. $14.95 New Trade Paper add to wish list
  5. $5.50 Used Trade Paper add to wish list

    Saint George and the Dragon

    Margaret Hodges
  6. $3.75 Used Trade Paper add to wish list

    Emil and Karl

    Yankev Glatshteyn

Related Aisles

  • back to top

Powell's City of Books is an independent bookstore in Portland, Oregon, that fills a whole city block with more than a million new, used, and out of print books. Shop those shelves — plus literally millions more books, DVDs, and eBooks — here at Powells.com.