Travels
Often I feel I go to some distant region of the world to be reminded of who I really am.
When Michael Crichton -- a Harvard-trained physician, bestselling novelist, and successful movie director -- began to feel isolated in his own life, he decided to widen his horizons. He tracked wild animals in the jungles of Rwanda. He climbed Kilimanjaro and Mayan pyramids. He trekked across a landslide in Pakistan. He swam amid sharks in Tahiti.
Fueled by a powerful curiosity and the need to see, feel, and hear firsthand and close-up, Michael Crichton has experienced adventures as compelling as those he created in his books and films. These adventures -- both physical and spiritual -- are recorded here in Travels, Crichton's most astonishing and personal work.
Product Details
Editorial Reviews
From Publishers Weekly
A Harvard medical-school graduate, inveterate traveler and author of, among other books, The Great Train Robbery (the film version of which he directed), Crichton seeks in immediate experience of new places and cultures to "redefine" himself and uncover the nature of reality. His curiosity and self-deprecating humor animate recitals of adventures tracking animals in Malay jungles, climbing Kilimanjaro and Mayan pyramids in the Yucatan, trekking across a landslide in Pakistan, scuba diving in the Caribbean and New Guinea and amid sharks in Tahiti. This memoir includes essays on his medical training and forays into the psychic, including channeling and exorcism, that have led him to conclude that scientists and mystics share the same basic search for universal truth by different paths. 75,000 first printing; BOMC alternate; Franklin Library First Edition selection.
Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Library Journal
Crichton, an accomplished novelist and filmmaker, here gives us autobiography. The first quarter of the book chronicles his gradual disillusionment with medical school and his decision not to practice medicine. His accounts of visits to remote places in Asia and Africa present a perspective on his personal life. Shuffled among these chapters are accounts of psychic experiences that include channeling, exorcism, and spoon-bending and end with a defense of "paranormal experience." Crichton has had an interesting life, which he writes about in a crisp and disarmingly frank manner. His inner "travels" offer something for almost everyone.Harold M. Otness, Southern Oregon State Coll. Lib., Ashland
Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From the Inside Flap
"Entertaining, and in the best sense of the word, unsettling."
THE WASHINGTON POST BOOK WORLD
Fueled by a powerful curiosity--and by a need to see and feel and hear, firsthand and close-up--Michael Crichton's travels have carried him into worlds diverse and compelling. This is a record of those travels--an exhilarating quest across the familiar and exotic frontiers of the outer world, a determined odyssey into the unfathomable, spiritual depths of the inner world. It is an adventure of risk and rejuvenation, terror and wonder, as exciting as Michael Crichton's many masterful and widely heralded works of fiction.
Customer Reviews
Travels With Michael
As a book-lover, you probably have a favorite that you read a couple of times a year. It sits there in your bookcase, and as you pass by you glance at it and smile, thinking of how much it's meant to you. And one day as you notice it, you say to yourself, "It's time I read this again!"
And so you do, visiting this old dear friend. You see aspects of its personality you hadn't fully noticed in previous readings, concepts that had escaped you before.
"Travels," by Michael Crichton, is my old dear friend.
Crichton was the author of "Jurassic Park," "The Andromeda Strain" and so many other books; and was the creator of the TV show "ER."
But did you know when he was a medical student at Harvard, he wrote a mystery he called, "A Case of Need"...using the pseudonymn "Jeffery Hunter" so no one at the university would know he was the author (students were supposed to study, not write books)? And he'd have been sucessfully anonymous, only....ooops! His book won the Mystery Writers of America "Edgar" as best mystery novel of the year.
The first part of "Travels" is "Medical Days," a fascinating look into the lives of medical students and their patients. It's not written in dry medical terms but in arresting vignettes of different patients, fellow students and teachers.
This takes us from 1965 through 1969 and to page 81 (paperback edition). Then he wrote about his travels (1971 through 1986).
He climbed Mount Kilimanjaro, and when we read it we're taken right along with him. Wore me out. In Rwanda, he went looking for gorillas and found them. A zoologist with him said that she couldn't study gorillas because they "were men." At the end of his stay there, he understood what she meant by that remark.
In northern Kenya Crichton went eye to eye with an elephant in the middle of the night; in Bonaire he almost died when scuba diving with his sister; he found Shangri-La, which is no "Shangri-La;" in Jamaica his girlfriend invited a murderer into the back of their car and he came THIS close to being killed; in Pahang he was literally covered with bees in the jungle; he went swimming with sharks in Tahiti...so many countries, so many adventures, and through them all he was totally open about his feelings, about who he was (he learned this along the way.)
Crichton was self-deprecating, which is odd, because this 6'-9" man was handsome, brilliant and talented.
A little more than half-way through the book, things take an interesting/weird/off-the-wall (depending upon your point of view) turn. These chapters are about his "inner travels."
Can you picture Michael Crichton believing in spoon bending, seeing and fluffing auras, talking to cacti? He did, and the chapter "Cactus Teachings" so affected me that years ago I bought a huge cactus and have it yet.
The chapter "An Entity" is one I'll read more than once when I get to it.
At the end of the book, Crichton listed his conclusions about psychic phenomena. There are three. First, consciousness has legitimate dimensions not yet guessed at. Secondly, at least some psychic phenomena are real. Third, there are energies associated with the human body that are not yet understood.
(At his web site, he was asked once if he still believed what he wrote about in "Travels," and he answered that he did, but that he went on to other things.)
He did NOT believe in levitation, flying saucers, the Bermuda Triangle, extraterrestrials, palmistry, numerology, astrology, psychic surgery, biorhythms, coincidence or pyramid power.
Well, neither do I, but still...that chapter on "an entity"....
And now it's time to get comfortable in my beat-up recliner. sweetened tea at hand, and begin to read for perhaps the fortieth time, "Travels."
Oh, Michael, we miss you so.
Learning about our own minds by exploring the world
No arm chair traveler here. Chrichton shares adventures climbing Kilimanjaro, exploring New Guinea, hiking through the Himalayas, and participating in metaphysical retreats. He also shares his inner-most thoughts, insights about meaning of life, and impact of geography and culture on his world view and inner child. He willingness reveals his frailties but not to demonstrate humility but as object lessons on how to observe oneself and hence to better understand and benefit from how our mind works. Chrichton is willing to bare his soul to help himself and the reader have a better understanding about what is possible.
One of the top 10 books I've ever read
This is not just a travel book. It is a collection of experiences as well that will appeal to travelers of the spiritual realms as well the physical world. Michael has led a truly remarkable life and it is well worth the read!
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