The Monk of Park Avenue

The Monk of Park Avenue is a kaleidoscopic ride through the upper echelons of New York Society and the nature-worshipping, sword-wielding world of East Asian religious and martial arts. A memoir like no other, it recounts a privileged childhood in Manhattan, the bitter rigors of kung fu in China, meditating in Daoist temples, hobnobbing with governors, kings, and Nobel laureates, incarceration in a high-mountain Ecuadorian hellhole, the appearance of ghosts, brushes with whales and with the Mob, and a fight for survival in Paraguay's brutal thorn jungle. A story of love, loss, redemption, persistence, tragedy, triumph, and mastery, The Monk of Park Avenue is peopled with the likes of Jacqueline Onassis, Milos Forman, Zero Mostel, Danny Kaye, George Burns, John Denver, Erich Fromm, Sofia Loren, Richard Holbrooke, Paul McCartney, Warren Beatty, and now-infamous opioid purveyors, the Sackler Family.The Monk of Park Avenue is no mere celebrity tell-all, but a novelist and martial master's path to spiritual attainment rendered in high literary style and with propulsive drive.