Into the Magic Shop

Jim Doty grew up poor in the California high desert, with an alcoholic father and a mother who was chronically sad and crippled by a stroke. He is now the director of Stanford University’s Center for Compassion and Altruism Research and Education (CCARE), of which the Dalai Lama is a founding sponsor. But his life was a dead end back then, until he stumbled into a magic shop at the age of twelve, looking for a plastic thumb.