cuke.com - home of Cuke Archives
Cuke Press
Cuke page for A Brief History of Tassajara
Press Release and Book Info Sheet
for
A Brief History of Tassajara
TITLE:
A Brief History of Tassajara
SUBTITLE: From Native American Sweat Lodges to
Pioneering Zen Monastery
AUTHOR:
Marilyn McDonald
FOREWORD (and Afterword): David Chadwick
PUBLISHER: Cuke Press
DISTRIBUTOR: Itasca Books PRINTED BY: Bookmobile in Minneapolis on
80# paper
PUBLICATION DATE:
11/19/2018
ISBN:
978-1-7322877-0-9
LCCN: 2018945607
PCIP
included
RETAIL PRICE:
$20
FORMAT:
6" x 9" Trade Paperback - 194 pages
PHOTOS/IMAGES:: 260 B&W
INDEX:
includes every person mentioned in text or image, many place names.
INTENDED AUDIENCE:
For
teens and up interested in California history, Zen, wilderness, and those
who love Tassajara.
Tassajara Hot Springs is located in
the Ventana Wilderness of Monterey County, an inholding in the Los Padres
National Forest nine miles inland from Big Sur. For millennia it was used by
Native Americans, chiefly the Esselen, who went there to cure their ills. In the
1700s the Spanish came, then trappers and homesteaders. First accessible only by
foot or horse, a road was cut through the mountains by Chinese laborers so that
horse-drawn wagons could make the treacherous trip. With photos and stories of
those times up to the mid-1980s: tents, log cabins, fish and game, the early
cars, the people and their attire, the sandstone hotel and the fire that
destroyed it, the succession of characters who held it including an illiterate
bear hunter who'd camp there and Hollywood actor Phillip Terry, ex-husband of
Joan Crawford. This famed resort in the mid-1960s become the site of the Western
world's first Zen Buddhist monastery founded by Shunryu Suzuki, founder also of
the San Francisco Zen Center and author of the classic Zen Mind, Beginner's
Mind. Out of the kitchen sprang the
influential Tassajara Bread Book and other Tassajara cook books.
Marilyn McDonald initially came to
Tassajara as a guest in 1974. Her first meal there was a lunch sitting across
from a raconteur named Jack Novcich who'd lost an arm and a leg early in the
century and had been coming to Tassajara for a few weeks in the summer ever
since. Over the next ten years Marilyn spent many hours researching Tassajara
history, interviewing, and combing through old newspaper articles. In 1985 she
put the results of this passion into a scrapbook and gave it to Tassajara where
it sat in the office for a few decades. This is Marilyn's scrapbook, cleaned up
a little, yet sticking closely to and retaining the funky charm of the original.
A bio of her and others involved is at the link listed below.
David Chadwick, who wrote Crooked
Cucumber, the Life and Zen Teaching of Shunryu Suzuki, was head monk at
Tassajara when Marilyn McDonald arrived. He met her at the lunch referred to.
More on how this book came about is told in his Forward which can be read on his
cuke.com website along with Marilyn McDonald's Introduction and Acknowledgments,
and a brief piece called On Producing This Book. Chadwick's ever-evolving web
presence provides a door at
www.cuke.com/tass-marilyn for further elaboration and exploration, including
the books index in expanded and searchable form.
Cuke Press, LLC, PO Box 151471, San Rafael, CA
www.cuke.com/cuke-press
Contact Cuke Press