Blaming Japhy Rider : Memoir of a Dharma Bum Who Survived

Inspired by and responding to Jack Kerouac's Dharma Bums, this memoir details the psychological and spiritual triumph over severe psychological difficulties caused by a series of traumas endured in the Peace Corps in West Africa in 1978. Surveying the spiritual landscape of America through the seventies to the present in Zen, Tibetan Buddhist, New Age and Christian movements, this memoir describes the journey of author Philip A. Bralich's life, beginning as a twenty-something, leftist, married, seventies idealist in the Peace Corps in West Africa, through an accident in the bush that cost his wife her life and himself much of the use of he left leg, and through the growing and debilitating psychological difficulties that were finally resolved through wide reading and personal experience of many of the spiritual and psychological movements of those four decades. The book commences in West Africa in 1978 but also goes back to as early as 1973, just four years after Jack Kerouac died.

Philip A. Bralich has a PhD in linguistics. He spent many years teaching ESL and essay and research writing. He has much experience presenting at professional conferences and publications in theoretical syntax, ESL, and computational linguistics, as well as with professional business presentations, business writing, and grant writing.
He is motivated by the tragic accident that took his wife's life and much of the use of his left leg; the memoir describes a thirty-year journey through western and eastern psychology, including much reading, practice, and an inadvertent but much loved run in with the word of the beats.
Bralich currently lives in Monterey, California, where he is writing screenplays and this memoir. After having been laid off once again from the best job of his life, he decided to take his meager savings and resolve his difficulties once and for all. The PTSD and survivor's guilt from his accident were finally resolved through this effort. His studies and travels began in Peace Corps in West Africa, and moved through years in Hawaii, two years in Japan, and approximately two years in group meditation retreats and many Buddhist centers across North America.