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.
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.
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…
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…
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…
Too often, I find that novelists force the endings of their books in ways that aren’t true to their characters, the stories, or their settings. Often, they do so to provide the Hollywood ending that many readers crave. That always leaves me cold. I love novels whose characters are complex, human, and believable and interact with their setting and the story in ways that do not stretch credulity. This is how I try to approach my own writing and was foremost in my mind as I set out to write my own book.
The Oracle of Spring Garden Road explores the life and singular worldview of “Crazy Eddie,” a brilliant, highly-educated homeless man who panhandles in front of a downtown bank in a coastal town.
Eddie is a local enigma. Who is he? Where did he come from? What brought him to a life on the streets? A dizzying ride between past and present, the novel unravels these mysteries, just as Eddie has decided to return to society after two decades on the streets, with the help of Jane, a woman whose intelligence and integrity rival his own. Will he succeed, or is…
“Crazy Eddie” is a homeless man who inhabits two squares of pavement in front of a bank in downtown Halifax, Nova Scotia. In this makeshift office, he panhandles and dispenses his peerless wisdom. Well-educated, fiercely intelligent with a passionate interest in philosophy and a profound love of nature, Eddie is an enigma for the locals. Who is he? Where did he come from? What brought him to a life on the streets? Though rumors abound, none capture the unique worldview and singular character that led him to withdraw from the perfidy and corruption of human beings. Just as Eddie has…
