Carlos Castaneda

Margaret Runyan Castaneda dies at 90; ex-wife of mystic author

2012-01-30 00:00:00

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...

Carlos Castaneda's ex-wife dies

2012-01-31 14:40:18

Book review: 'The Border Lords' by T. Jefferson Parker

2011-01-19 00:00:00

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...

Straddling the old world and the new in 'The Farthest Home Is in an Empire of Fire'

2010-05-02 00:00:00

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...

Book review: 'The Four Fingers of Death' by Rick Moody

2010-07-25 00:00:00

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...

Testing mushrooms' magic

2006-11-19 00:00:00

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...

Juan Valdez pours fresh cup to get cafe cachet

2007-11-22 00:00:00

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...

A quarter-century marriage to a man behind bars

2008-11-30 00:00:00

First of Three Parts The summer after her first year of law school, Pamela Dowden dug a red calico sundress out of her closet and left her apartment in Sacramento. It was a hot, shadeless morning. She drove her orange Datsun pickup out of town as...

David Baldacci will ruin you

2008-06-22 00:00:00

Young people are constantly being warned that the information they include in their Facebook profiles could eventually come back to haunt them. Photographs of bacchanalian escapades, catastrophic sartorial decisions or intimate moments with toothless,...

Commentary: Love sprouts in Berkeley, blossoms in CdM

2012-12-13 12:09:55

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,...

In Theory: What about bullying?

2010-10-14 00:00:00

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...

Dads Arrested For Attempted Robbery While Kids Waited In Car

2011-03-18 17:00:00

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...

Carlos Castaneda, center, is Colombia's new Juan Valdez. He was chosen out of 400 mustachioed hopefuls after a two-year search.

2007-11-21 16:23:09