Joey Madia, New Mystics Reviews

  (Beverly, MA: Motorbooks, an imprint of The Quarto Group, 2025). ISBN: 978-0-7603-9148-8 This beautifully designed coffee table book, edited by Jim Hinckley (a statue of whom is a popular Route 66 tourist destination in his hometown of Kingman, Arizona), helps to further the case that the myriad books about the Mother Road that continue to be published are very much like the businesses and attractions on the route itself. Each offers a unique view of the landscape and menu. Although I have read more than twenty books and many articles about Route 66 in the past four years—including titles by Hinckley and some of his coauthors here—I found an impressive amount of new information, which I attribute to not only the authors’ varied experiences, but how those experiences shape their individual approaches to their chapters. More on that to come. No matter how educated you are on the subject matter, chances are excellent you’ll learn something new. The photography in Route 66: 100 Y...

    (San Francisco and Los Angeles: Spirit Rising Publications, 2015). ISBN: 978-0-9912064-4-5 Scanning the nine pages of blurbs at the start of this important handbook for making a difference in a dark and troubled world, you will immediately notice the names: His Holiness the Fourteenth Dalai Lama, Neale Donald Walsch, Arun Gandhi, Louis Gossett Jr., Ervin Laszlo, and Edgar Mitchell, among many others. This, and the fact that it is now in its fourth edition, creates big expectations for The Rainbow Bridge , and, to me, it meets them. To those who have been doing social justice and spiritual work for any length of time—for me it is more than two decades—you will find the age-old wisdom very familiar and the continually quoted names to be in many ways your standard fare. In balance, however, with this abundance of the familiar are sections of the book that are very original, profound, and most importantly, ambitious . Perhaps some readers might even think they are naïve . ...