Par­adise Cove: They Escaped the Cuckoo’s Nest is a pow­er­ful first­hand account of life inside a South­ern Cal­i­for­nia res­i­den­tial facil­i­ty for recov­er­ing psy­chi­atric patients — as told by an unlike­ly observ­er, George T. Nagel, an 80-year-old grad­u­ate stu­dent who vol­un­teered there in the 1970s as field­work for his master’s at Cal­i­for­nia State Uni­ver­si­ty, North­ridge. With clar­i­ty, com­pas­sion, and humor, Nagel cap­tures the strug­gles and tri­umphs of those nav­i­gat­ing the frag­ile space between insti­tu­tion­al­iza­tion and inde­pen­dence, while trac­ing his own qui­et path toward heal­ing. But Nagel har­bored an extra­or­di­nary secret: he was in fact Rab­bi Yechezkel Taub — the Yablon­er Rebbe — a Hasidic leader who led his fol­low­ers from Poland to pre-state Israel before aban­don­ing his faith and dis­ap­pear- ing into sec­u­lar anonymi­ty in Los Ange­les. Rab­bi Pini Dun­ner redis­cov­ered this man­u­script, and added con­text, anno­ta­tions, and reflec­tions that restore the for­got­ten lega­cy of a vision­ary leader. It’s an aston­ish­ing sto­ry with all the ele­ments of intrigue — a secret iden­ti­ty, an incred­i­ble redis­cov­ery, and a bridge between con­ti­nents, gen­er­a­tions, and dis­parate worlds.