***WINNER - IPPY Bronze Book Award - Best Regional Fiction (2009)
***WINNER - BookBundlz Best Book (2009-2010 Winter Award)
The Hierophant of 100th Street is a remarkable, unusual book: a
metaphysical novel set in a violent world of slums, gangs, and prisons.
Drawing on the author's experience of growing up in the infamous East
Harlem neighborhood of 100th Street in the 1960s, the story follows
17-year-old Adam Kadman and his 9-year-old brother John through their
respective initiations into the realities of street life while
simultaneously introducing real-life characters who dwell in the life of
the spirit.
Veiled in the guise of fiction, most of what appears in the book is
actually a truthful account of the author's real-life experience. Like
the author, the young Adam also ventures out from the slums of New York
to discover the meaning of life amid the horrors of existence, and finds
romance, mysticism, and purpose.
Seeking to extricate himself from 100th Street, Adam is drafted into the
army and later travels to Egypt, where in a harsh world of theocrats and
misogynists he falls in love with a young Arab woman. Out of his
element, he attacks the social structure--and ends up running for his
life. He returns back to the old neighborhood only to find it changed
... destroyed by an invasion of drugs, betrayal, and murder.
By chance he encounters a mysterious man, Clifford Bias (a renowned
twentieth-century clairvoyant), and is taken under the wing of the
magus. Discovering his own psychic abilities, Adam enters his mentor's
secret society and a world of mysticism and love. Tapping the same rich
spiritual vein as The Da Vinci Code and The Celestine Prophecy and
written in the stark language of the streets, this daring, cinematic
novel explores the ancient truths and metaphysical mysteries hidden in
the fabric of everyday life.
