Description

Michael Murphy's Golf in the Kingdom is one of the bestselling golf books of all time and has been hailed as "a golf classic if any exists in our day" (John Updike) and "a masterpiece on the mysticism of golf" (San Francisco Chronicle).  Golf in the Kingdom introduced Shivas Irons, the mysterious golf pro and philosopher with whom Murphy played a mythic round of golf on Scotland's Burningbush links, a round that profoundly altered his game--and his vision.

The Kingdom of Shivas Irons is the enchanting story of Murphy's return to Scotland in search of Shivas Irons and his wisdom about golf and human potential.  Murphy's quest takes him from the mystical golf courses of Scotland, across the world to the first Russian Open Golf Championship, and finally to Pebble Beach on the California Coast.  The result is a delightful exploration of the inner game of golf and a provocative inquiry into our remarkable possibilities for growth and transformation.

About the Author

Michael Murphy began his quest into the nature of human potential in the late 1950s while a psychology major at Stanford University. After a year of graduate school, he spent 18 months in India, at the ashram of Sri Aurobindo in Pondicherry. Aurobindo started him thinking about the relationship between the evolution of consciousness and the physical body.

In 1961, shortly after his return to the United States, Murphy met Richard Price, another Standford Psychology major, and in 1962 they founded the Esalen Institute in Big Sur, California. The Esalen Institute, the leading growth center in the world, has hosted thousands of human potential workshops and conferences led by such notables as Abraham Maslow, Joseph Campbell, Rollo May, Fritz Perls, Aldous Huxley, Carl Rogers, Ida Rolf, Joan Halifax, Stanislov Grof, Joan Borysenko, Allen Ginsberg, and Linus Pauling, to name a few.

In 1980, he helped create the Esalen Institute’s Soviet American Exchange program which, among other things, initiated the first live television space bridges and hosted Boris Yeltsin during his first visit to the United States.

Michael Murphy is the author of The Future of the Body, Golf in the Kingdom (released by Penguin Books/Arkana), Jacob Atabet, and End to Ordinary History, and co-author of The Psychic Side of Sports. Golf in the Kingdom has been translated into more than two dozen languages and sold well over a million copies. He lives in San Rafael, California.