This is one of the most original memoirs of the twentieth century. All great memoirs are a clutch of different books marvelously conjured into one. The Other Side of Eden . is no exception. It is at once an exorcism of family wounds and secrets, an expos of the projections of religious seekers and of the baroque and lethal world of New Age cults and gurus. This poignant unfolding of a great love affair between two wounded, difficult but dogged lovers is also the account of a journey into awakening through the massacre of illusion after illusion, to the awakening that lies on the other side of Eden.
Few books risk, or achieve, so much under such blisteringly candid authority.
Reading it is as much a rite of passage as a literary experience. It's hard to come up with modifiers to fit the extraordinary story told in The Other Side of Eden , and the even more extraordinary way that story is told by a writer of tortured and torturing genius. John Steinbeck IV illuminates and transcends his famous father here in penetrating, poetic, and often devastating prose. One steps away from this book in awe of the terrible struggles of this writer's son whose immense talents might have, under different circumstances, even surpassed his celebrated father's. Nancy Steinbeck, with skill and sometimes profoundly disturbing candor, fleshes out her husband's story until, in the end, one feels that nothing has been left out, neither joy nor horror.