The Olympic Odyssey: Rekindling the True Spirit of the Great Games

The author of Once and Future Myths and sixteen other books brings together myths and fables with modern anecdotes in an attempt to capture the spirit of the Olympics, featuring interviews with recent medalists as well as interviews with cultural commentators on the role of the games in modern society and culture. Original.

Phil Cousineau is an author, editor, teacher, adventure travel leader, photographer, and documentary filmmaker. His life-long fascination with the art, literature, and history of culture has taken him on journeys around the world. He lectures frequently on a wide range of topics from creativity, mythology, mentorship, and soul to pilgrimage and community work.

Born at an army hospital in Columbia, South Carolina in 1952, Phil Cousineau grew up in Wayne, Michigan, just outside of Detroit. While moonlighting in an automotive parts factory, he studied journalism at the University of Detroit. Before turning to writing full-time in 1984, his peripatetic career included stints as a sportswriter and photographer, playing basketball in Europe, harvesting date trees on an Israeli kibbutz, and painting forty-four Victorian houses in San Francisco.

His best-selling books, Once and Future Myths and The Art of Pilgrimage, are his most recent works. He has authored many more, including the winner of the 1991 Fallot Literary Award, Deadlines: A Rhapsody on a Theme of Famous Last Words. His books have been tranlated into seven languages. Moreover, he is a contributor to sixteen other books, one of which was a collaboration with John Densmore on his best-selling autobiography, Riders on the Storm: My Life with Jim Morrison and The Doors.

Cousineau's articles, reviews, and poetry have been widely published in magazines and newspapers around the country. He has led eight art and literary tours to soulful places in Ireland, England, France, Greece, and Turkey. He has collaborated with many of the leading thinkers and teachers of our time, namely Huston Smith, Joseph Campbell, Robert A. Johnson, Robert Bly, and many more. His twelve screenwriting credits in documentary films, which have won more than twenty-five international awards, include the 1991 Academy Award-nominated Forever Activists: Stories from the Abraham Lincoln Brigade.

Current projects include two documentary films, The Future of the City and A Place at the Table: Struggling for American Indian Religious Freedom, a book of poetry, The Blue Museum, and a book of essays, Who Stole the Arms of the Venus de Milo?