The Greatest Men's Party on Earth: Inside the Bohemian Grove

Bohemian Grove is a closely guarded redwood preserve a hundred miles of so north of San Francisco. There the Bohemian Club - one of the supremely exclusive men's clubs in the nation - holds an annual encampment that may be, because of its scale and the participants, the most remarkable tribal ritual ever celebrated by the human male. Herbert Hoover, a dedicated Bohemian but hardly (one imagines) a man much given to hyperbole, called it the greatest men's party on earth. What happens when throngs of the most powerful Americans - leaders in industry, finance, politics, and the professions - forgather each July beneath the towering trees and luxuriously rough it for a frenetic fortnight? John van der Zee penetrated the sacred precincts in the guise of a waiter. From his personal observations, from conversations with members willing to talk, and from his delvings into the curious history of the club (it was founded, with the utmost informality, by a bunch of carefree newspapermen), he has made a highly entertaining book. Much of what he reveals is funny; some of it almost passes belief; none of it exactly sinister. But the book's total effect - as we contemplate the superlatively successful American male chauvinist at play - is by implication at least a little disturbing. --- from book's flyleaf