Love, Sex, and the Human Condition

About the Book

A handbook on passionate living for rational folk. Love, Sex, and the Human Condition cuts through our media fog of information about living the good life and serves up practical wisdom for people who like being fully alive-without slogans, sentimentality, or empty promises. So much of what keeps us from being who we might become has been laid on us by outside forces: incessant advertising, early childhood experience, the expectations of other people, inherited cultural and religious baggage. These, with our fierce drives for love, sex, and power, really enslave us. LSHC guides the reader through the maze of influences on our lives to a freedom rarely enjoyed these days. LSHC examines both the bright and dark sides of existence. Exploring both life and death and the creative and destructive aspects of human nature, the book shows how our drives for sex and power can work for us, and those around us, when tempered with love, reason, and liberated decision making. In provocative chapters like, "Learning to Be Free"; "Living Deliberately"; "Love, Power, and Happiness"; "Youth, Time, and Aging'; "Changing Ourselves Deliberately," Crane describes what people fully alive really do to stay ahead of that sense of quiet desperation stalking us. A penetrating account of the current human condition, and what it takes to be fully alive and engaged even in the face of today's overwhelming demands. The writing style is relaxed, witty, warm, and personal; the thinking fresh and profound. Crane is a teacher of essential wisdom, a real teacher, not a promoter of wishful or magical thinking, superstition or fundamentalism. Here you'll find just clear thinking, and a loving push in the direction of intentional living-an exciting endorsement of reason and love as our best guides to being fully alive.

About the Author

Lex worked at a wide variety of jobs in years past: teacher, radio announcer, retail salesman, land surveyor, bartender, spot welder, market surveyor, jackhammer operator, and ditch digger. He also spent time working in the copper shop at a shipyard, in a machine shop, and in the construction trades. He served in the US Army during World War II in both the South Pacific and in Europe, was severely wounded during the Battle of the Bulge in Belgium, and received a disability discharge from the Army. The author grew up on the east coast, but spent most of his career in the west. He is a graduate of Johns Hopkins University (MA), the Unitarian seminary in Berkeley, CA (STD), and the University of California at Santa Barbara (MA). The thesis for his MA in writing at Hopkins was "Six Experimental Short Stories;" at UCSB the thesis was on the social psychology of professionals. For many years he was a licensed counselor in California, as well as a Unitarian minister.