Volume 33, Number 11 · June 26, 1986
Esalen East
By James Joll
Mountain of Truth: The Counterculture Begins—Ascona, 1900–1920
by Martin Green
University Press of New England/Tufts University, 287 pp., $19.95
What have the following in common: Kafka, Rilke, D.H. Lawrence, F.R. Leavis, Alesteir Crowley, Gandhi, George Orwell, Expressionists, Surrealists, National Socialists? According to Martin Green they all, to a greater or lesser extent, 'fed on a living stream of thought that had its source in Ascona.' At first sight, this village in the Swiss canton of Ticino seems a surprising choice for the location of the springs of twentieth-century culture, but Martin Green is an Asconan imperialist: he writes of 'Ascona and its allied provinces' and tells us that the 'people who spent time in Ascona went on to other places such as Papua.'
Review, 3434 words
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