There is no quality of life without meaning, and there is no better meaning than the search for it. The Vision Quest has been a beacon of hope for me my entire life. It permeates all my aspirations and writing. It inspired me to hitchhike worldwide for five years and continued into my professional life. I hope you enjoy the selections.
This book is the ultimate spiritual rite of passage. It begins with a metaphor—a lone leopard dead on the summit of the mountain. I felt the pain and chaos of Hemingway’s protagonist, Harry, deeply dying of gangrene on the plains, never to find enlightened consciousness on the clean white mountain canvas high above.
Good things happen in the mountains; bad things happen on the plains. This story sparked my climb of Kilimanjaro, my vision quest in the Cartwheels Quadrilogy.
Men and women of passion and action live, fight, love and die in scenes of dramatic intensity. From haunting tragedy on the snow-capped peak of Kilimanjaro to brutal sensationalism in the bullring; from rural America with its deceptive calm to the heart of war-ravaged Europe, each of the stories in this classic collection is a feat of imagination, and a masterpiece of description. The Snows of Kilimanjaro is one of the best known and loved collections of stories by one of the greatest literary novelists of the twentieth century.
This book is the first story of the Southern Sea and the first true English novel. Full of sailing ships, stormy seas, symbolism, exotic desert islands, muskets, wild boars, and cannibals, it set the standard for every adventure story that followed.
I love the narrative of a lone castaway—facing the ultimate tests of nature to triumph over hardship. Robinsonade, a new renegade literary genre, emerged in which the hero is suddenly isolated from the comforts of civilization, marooned on a secluded island, tropical, uninhabited, and uncharted. He must improvise to become self-sufficient from limited resources.
Like my own hero quest, solitary conflict was required for character development, and the solitude led back to society and survival, or the ordeal would have no meaning.
'Robinson Crusoe has a universal appeal, a story that goes right to the core of existence' Simon Armitage
Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe, regarded by many to be first novel in English, is also the original tale of a castaway struggling to survive on a remote desert island.
The sole survivor of a shipwreck, Robinson Crusoe is washed up on a desert island. In his journal he chronicles his daily battle to stay alive, as he conquers isolation, fashions shelter and clothes, enlists the help of a native islander who he names 'Friday', and fights off cannibals and mutineers. Written in…
The future is uncertain, and the stakes are high. Climate change has wreaked havoc on the planet, and humanity is on the brink of extinction. The only hope lies in the Olympus Project, a plan to colonise the moon and build on the Artemis Base.
Tahir Shah’s writing is inspired, funny, multifaceted, and offbeat. This book is his account of hiring a crazy Vietnam vet named Richard Fowler to escort him into the remote Amazon to look for the birdmen of Peru.
I hired the same guy to take me and a good friend into the same jungle several years later, with similar results I recorded in Stout Men. Both are vision quests through slow water in strange company and a passion for the bizarre and grotesque.
Enthralled by the chronicle of a 16th-century Spanish monk, which said that the Incas 'flew like birds' over the jungle, and by the recurring theme of flying in Peruvian folklore, Tahir Shah set out to discover whether the Incas really did fly or glide above the jungles of Peru. Or was it flight of a different kind, inspired by powerful drugs? After gathering equipment in London the long quest begins, in the mountains of Peru, with a trek to Machu Picchu, the Incas' most sacred city. Then on to the mountain city of Cusco and a mysterious island on Lake…
I’ve always been a sucker for haiku. No one did it better than Matsuo Bashō, and none of his anthologies were better written than this book. Ten years ago, I went to Japan to experience his poem-pillow places.
The result was my own travelogue, Samurai Road, a vision quest perhaps not quite as spiritual or erudite as that of the master but no less inspired. Days and months are travelers of eternity. So are the years that pass by.
'It was with awe That I beheld Fresh leaves, green leaves, Bright in the sun'
When the Japanese haiku master Basho composed The Narrow Road to the Deep North, he was an ardent student of Zen Buddhism, setting off on a series of travels designed to strip away the trappings of the material world and bring spiritual enlightenment. He writes of the seasons changing, the smell of the rain, the brightness of the moon and the beauty of the waterfall, through which he sensed the mysteries of the universe. These writings not only chronicle Basho's travels, but they also capture…
Leora's Letters
by
Joy Neal Kidney,
Robin Grunder,
The day the second atomic bomb was dropped, Clabe and Leora Wilson’s postman brought a telegram to their acreage near Perry, Iowa. One son was already in the U.S. Navy before Pearl Harbor had been attacked. Four more sons worked with their father, tenant farmers near Minburn until, one by…
I first read this book at M.I.T., and it changed my outlook on life and its meaning. On odd weekends, I would drive out to his pond and stare at the lake to restore my own natural balance.
It is true that Thoreau was not as self-sufficient as he wished us to believe, but his lesson of mindfulness is a gift of Zen. I have emulated him my whole life and live on my own pond, Westwood Lake, where I’ve written my own chronicles of the seasons.
Henry David Thoreau is considered one of the leading figures in early American literature, and Walden is without doubt his most influential book.
Designed to appeal to the booklover, the Macmillan Collector's Library is a series of beautiful gift editions of much loved classic titles. Macmillan Collector's Library are books to love and treasure.
It recounts the author's experiences living in a small house in the woods around Walden Pond near Concord in Massachusetts. Thoreau constructed the house himself, with the help of a few friends, to see if he could live 'deliberately' - independently and apart from society. The…
My book is the first of four books about a maverick young doctor’s five-year hitchhiking odyssey around the world.
The first arc he carved with his thumb stopped a little red pickup that took him over the horizon. With his night sky companion, Orion, he rolled towards the dawn on a vision quest; he regained his sight and discovered his Destiny.
1184 BCE. Ramesses III, who will become the last of the great pharaohs, is returning home from battle. He will one day assume the throne of the Egyptian empire, and the plots against him and his children have already started. Even a god can die.
In the harrowing aftermath of Chornobyl's meltdown in 1986, the fate of Eastern Europe hangs by a thread.
From Beijing, American radiation scientist Lara, once a thorn in the Russian mob's side, is drawn back into the shadows of the Soviet Union on the Trans-Mongolian Express. She isn't alone. Anton,…
