Don Lattin

Lattin is one of the nation’s leading journalists covering alternative and mainstream religious movements and figures in America. Lattin’s award-winning work has appeared in dozens of U.S. magazines and newspapers, including the San Francisco Chronicle, where Don covered the religion beat for nearly two decades. He has also worked as a consultant and commentator for DatelineNBC, PrimeTime Live, Good Morning America, American Morning on CNN, and Religion and Ethics News Weekly on PBS. He has broken several national stories including the Jim Jones/ Peoples Temple mass-suicide at Jonestown in 1978. Don has taught religion writing at the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California at Berkeley. Among his many awards for journalism, he has been a three-time nominee for the Pulitzer Prize. He is the author of Following Our Bliss: How the Spiritual Ideals of the Sixties Shape Our Lives Today and coauthor of Shopping for Faith: American Religion in the New Millennium. Visit the author online at www.donlattin.com

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American/Pop Culture

Biography/History

Body, Mind, and Spirit

The Harvard Psychedelic Club

How Timothy Leary, Ram Dass, Huston Smith, and Andrew Weil Killed the Fifties and Ushered in a New Age for America

Talking Points

Don Lattin is an experienced and well respected journalist. He can reach to the sizable number of Americans who attend yoga classes, go to health-food stores, employ alternative herbal medicines or acupuncture, identify as Buddhists, practice some form of meditation, identify as “spiritual but not religious,” follow Oprah, etc., are unimaginable without the influence of Andrew Weil, Ram Dass, and Huston Smith profiled here at the turning point in American open mindedness.

The Sixties Generation and its advances are unthinkable without accounting for experimenting with drugs, the influence of Eastern mysticism, vegetarianism and exploring non-western medicines. The four pioneers who paved the way for those explorations are profiled here in this “tell-all” multiple-biography.

Description

This book is the story of how three brilliant scholars and one ambitious freshman crossed paths in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in the winter of 1960-61, and how their experiences in a psychedelic drug research project transformed their lives and much of American culture in the 1960s and 1970s.

They came together in a time of upheaval and experimentation, and they set the stage for the social, spiritual, sexual, and psychological revolution of the 1960s. Huston Smith would be the teacher, practicing every world religion and educating three generations of Americans to adopt a more tolerant, inclusive attitude toward other culture’s religions. Richard Alpert would be the seeker, traveling to India, returning to America as “Ram Dass” and reborn as a spiritual leader with his “Be Here Now” mantra, inspiring a restless army of spiritual pilgrims. Andrew Weil would be the healer, becoming the undisputed leader of alternative medicine, devoting his life to the holistic reformation of the American health care system. And Timothy Leary would play the rebellious trickster, the premier proponent of the therapeutic and spiritual benefits of LSD, advising a generation to “turn on, tune in, and drop out.”

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American/Pop Culture

Biography/History

Jesus Freaks

A True Story of Murder and Madness on the Evangelical Edge

Talking Points

Don Lattin is an award-winning journalist who worked for the San Francisco Chronicle for two decades. He has interviewed players on all sides of his stories,  completes extensive archival research, and presents his stories in an objective, chilling, “you are there” manner.

Description

In the tradition of Jon Krakauer’s Under the Banner of Heaven, Jesus Freaks is the story of a January 2005 murder/suicide that shed new light on the Children of God/Family International, one of the most controversial religious movements to emerge from the spiritual turmoil of the 1960s and 1970s. It is the story of Ricky “Davidito” Rodriguez, a child born into the inner sanctum of the Children of God, a new religious movement that sent thousands of hippies, leftists and “Jesus freaks” on a long strange trip into the messianic fantasy of cult leader David “Moses” Berg, and spawned a second generation that still struggles with that legacy.

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