Author Description

<p><P><b>Through the Self-Help Glass &#151; Very Darkly</b><P>Meet Ashton Robinson, a dashing playboy whose suave charm, worldly pretensions, and ecstatic seminars have made him one of the most successful motivational speakers in the country.<P>After an encounter with the synergistic effects of marijuana and expired cough syrup, Robinson renounces his life as a self-help icon and pronounces himself a spiritually enlightened master. Overnight he invents the world's newest religion, based on meditation, bungee-cord jumping, tantric sex, and The Gap. Has he stumbled upon one of the great truths of the universe? Or has the same outsized ego that fueled his success as a motivational speaker driven him over the edge?<P>With surgical wit and acuity, Trey Ellis has written a titillating and trenchant tale about the revivalist fervor of the American self-help industry. Right Here, Right Now is a corrosively funny and provocative exploration of the impulse to self-improvement &#151; one of the most salient features of American popular culture at the close of the twentieth century.<br></p><h3>Lang</h3><p>The end of the world promises a lot -- sex, death, and enlightenment, not necessarily in that order -- especially for a brother willing and able to reinvent himself for a hungry public. <p> With the Christian cosmic odometer about to roll over to 2000, something big is primed to explode. Innumerable spiritual awakenings tease an expectant world. From the sacred to the profane, possible tomorrows unfurl at an alarming pace, sand and sense vacating the millennial hourglass faster and faster. <p> Sightings of Jesus or the Virgin Mary -- loving visages divined in the faded grain of a gnarled oak -- appear commonplace. New Age spiritualists call to the light/spirit/goddess/universe for answers. Even television's high priestess herself, the beloved Oprah, challenges us to Change Our Lives in five-minute sound bites. Meanwhile, atheists remain doggedly trenchant in their religious di