Carlos Castaneda

It was August 1977 and my plan was to drive up to the Bay Area for three back-to-back national psychology conferences, followed by a week-long meditation workshop with Tarthang Tulku in Berkeley. I'd recently become licensed as a psychologist at age 28,...

They were an unlikely couple, the Latin American immigrant and the West Virginia divorcee whose paths crossed in mid-1950s Los Angeles. But, by Margaret Runyan Castaneda's account, she and Carlos Castaneda were kindred spirits whose time together...

Cyber bullying has become more and more commonplace in schools, seemingly replacing or becoming part of common playground bullying. This issue has been brought into the forefront on the heels of the suicide of 18-year-old Rutgers University freshman Tyler...

When it comes to the crime-based fiction that long has played such an important role in the literary life of Los Angeles, we're living through what amounts to a golden age. The dark ecstasies of James Ellroy, Michael Connelly's artful probing of the...

Two young fathers are in Sacramento County Jail accused of trying to rob a business while their kids were waiting in a car. Sacramento police Sgt. Norm Leong says 27-year-old Carlos Castaneda and 25-year-old Jamone  Paiva walked into a convenience store...

COSTA MESA — In just two second-period English classes at TeWinkle Intermediate School, students reading performance ranged from "at grade level" to first grade and English-language learners. "That's a big gap for our teachers to cover," said...

The Farthest Home Is in an Empire of Fire A Tejano Elegy John Phillip Santos Viking: 280 pp., $25.95 John Phillip Santos went in search of his Mexican father's indigenous roots in his 1999 National Book Award finalist, "Places Left Unfinished at the...

The Four Fingers of Death A Novel Rick Moody Little, Brown: 730 pp., $25.99 Rick Moody grew up on a nutritious diet of Pynchon, Vonnegut (to whom this book is dedicated), Roth and Updike, some Melville and Hawthorne for New England-style moralizing, a...

Resting on a hospital bed beneath a tie-dyed wall hanging, Pamela Sakuda felt a tingling sensation. Then bright colors started shimmering in her head. She had been depressed since being diagnosed with colon cancer two years earlier, but as the...

On Tuesday, the brewing controversy over CBS' "Kid Nation," the forthcoming reality television series that placed 40 children, ages 8 to 15, in the New Mexico desert to build a society without contact with their parents for 40 days, became even more...

The ever-faithful mule is still by his side, the poncho neatly draped over his shoulder, the straw hat perched atop the serene, mustachioed visage. But this is a new Juan Valdez -- younger, more vigorous, more eco-conscious -- a Colombian coffee grower...