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Summary
Summary
From the bestselling author ofnbsp; Jurassic Park ,nbsp; Timeline , andnbsp; Spherenbsp; comes a deeply personal memoir full of fascinating adventures as he travels everywhere from the Mayan pyramids to Kilimanjaro.nbsp;
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Fueled by a powerful curiosity--and by a need to see, feel, and hear, firsthand and close-up--Michael Crichton's journeys have carried him into worlds diverse and compelling--swimming with mud sharks in Tahiti, tracking wild animals through the jungle of Rwanda. 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.
Author Notes
John Michael Crichton, known as Michael Crichton, was born on October 28, 1942 in Chicago, Illinois. He wrote novels while attending Harvard University and Harvard Medical School to help pay the tuition. One of these, The Andromeda Strain, which was published in 1969, became a bestseller. After graduating summa cum laude, he was a postdoctoral fellow at the Salk Institute in California before becoming a full-time writer and film director.
His carefully researched novels included Eaters of the Dead, The Terminal Man, The Great Train Robbery, Congo, Sphere, Jurassic Park, Rising Sun, Disclosure, The Lost World, Airframe, and Micro. He also wrote non-fiction works including Five Patients: The Hospital Explained, Jasper Johns, and Travels. In the late 1960s, he also wrote under the pen names Jeffrey Hudson and John Lange. He has received several awards including Writer of the Year in 1970 from the Association of American Medical Writers and two Edgar Awards in 1968 and in 1979.
Many of his novels have been made into highly successful films, six of which he directed. He was also the creator and executive producer of the Emmy Award-winning television series ER. In addition to his writing and directorial success, his expertise in information science enabled him to run a software company and develop a computer game. He died of cancer on November 4, 2008 at the age of 66.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
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. (April) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Booklist Review
In this autobiographical collection of episodic anecdotes spanning more than 20 years, doctor-turned-author Crichton (perhaps best known for his novel The Andromeda Strain) explores the outer world and discovers much about the inner world along the way. He circumnavigates the currently trendy spiritual-how-to genre with humor, sensitivity, and didactic honesty as his guides. Postulating that ``the only true expression of one's beliefs lies in action,'' he moves from medical school (and the requisite cadaver, dubbed Lady Brett) to ``Quitting Medicine,'' from near-death deep-sea diving in ``Bonaire'' to gaping at gorillas in Rwanda, and from ``London Psychics (1978)'' to an exorcism-his own. The book's disparate topics are arranged chronologically, and Crichton tends to wander a bit in certain chapters, but that is, after all, what travel is about. His sense of wonder and awe, his gentle encouragement toward ``direct experience,'' and his simple yet graphic prose will stir the wanderlust in many a reader. Bibliography; no index. ELK. 813'.54 (B) Crichton, Michael-Biography / Novelists, American-20th century-Biography [OCLC] 87-46040
Kirkus Review
Most Crichton books are champion sports-cars: sleek, high-powered, engineered for an quick evening spin. This time, however, the master of the compelling read (The Andromeda Strain, Congo, etc.) tosses some jalopies in with the Ferraris in this mostly satisfying collection of 38 essays on inner- and outer-voyaging. What a traveler he is! Mt. Kilimanjaro, Bangkok, the mountains of Pakistan, the seas of Bonaire, even ""Shangra-La"" (the Himalayan outpost of Hunza). Objectives vary: treasure-hunting, animal-watching, mountain-climbing, whorehouse-hopping. He's at his best in the nature pieces, especially in an outstanding description of stalking a troop of mountain gorillas (""Gorillas""), an essay that captures the eeriness and poignancy of this dying branch of the proto-human tree. Many entries (""Kilimanjaro,"" ""Cactus Teachings"") describe moments of self-discovery, while a few (""Jamaica"") bog down in fussing over personal relationships. Some seem to have no point at all, beyond Crichton's desire to screen his favorite home movies. A breed apart are the essays on inner space, in which Crichton comes across like a sober Shirley MacLaine as he happily chomps his way through channeling, clairvoyance, meditation, power spots, and other New Age goodies. This out-on-a-limb stuff culminates in a masterful defense (""Postscript: Skeptics at Cal Tech"") of the legitimacy of parapsychological research, one of the best essays of its kind anywhere. Also noteworthy: nine essays recalling his traumatic days at Harvard Medical School. Considering the decline in quality of Crichton's novels (culminating in the silliness of Sphere) and the excellence of many of these essays, one wonders whether his mature talent doesn't flourish best in nonfiction. With a bit of pruning, this would have been a brilliant travel album. As it is, the memorable snapshots easily outnumber the turkeys. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
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 (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Excerpts
Excerpts
Travels Chapter One Cadaver It is not easy to cut through a human head with a hacksaw. The blade kept snagging the skin, and slipping off the smooth bone of the forehead. If I made a mistake, I slid to one side or the other, and I would not saw precisely down the center of the nose, the mouth, the chin, the throat. It required tremendous concentration. I had to pay close attention, and at the same time I could not really acknowledge what I was doing, because it was so horrible. Four students had shared this cadaver for months, but it fell to me to cut open the old woman's head. I made the others leave the room while I worked on it. They couldn't watch without making jokes, which interfered with my concentration. The bones of the nose were particularly delicate, I had to proceed carefully, to cut without shattering these tissue-thin bones. Several times I stopped, cleaned the bits of bone from the teeth of the blade with my fingertips, and then continued. As I sawed back and forth, concentrating on doing a good job, I was reminded that I had never imagined my life would turn out this way. I had never particularly intended to become a doctor. I had grown up in a suburb of New York City, where my father was a journalist. No one in my family was a doctor, and my own early experiences with medicine were not encouraging: I fainted whenever I was given injections, or had blood drawn. I had gone to college planning to become a writer, but early on a scientific tendency appeared. In the English department at Harvard, my writing style was severely criticized and I was receiving grades of C or C+ on my papers. At eighteen, I was vain about my writing and felt it was Harvard, and not I, that was in error, so I decided to make an experiment. The next assignment was a paper on Gulliver's Travels , and I remembered an essay by George Orwell that might fit. With some hesitation, I retyped Orwell's essay and submitted it as my own. I hesitated because if I were caught for plagiarism I would be expelled; but I was pretty sure that my instructor was not only wrong about writing styles, but poorly read as well. In any case, George Orwell got a B- at Harvard, which convinced me that the English department was too difficult for me. I decided to study anthropology instead. But I doubted my desire to continue as a graduate student in anthropology, so I began taking premed courses, just in case. In general, I found Harvard an exciting place, where people were genuinely focused on study and learning, and with no special emphasis on grades. But to take a premed course was to step into a different world -- nasty and competitive. The most critical course was organic chemistry, Chem 20, and it was widely known as a "screw your buddy" course. In lectures, if you didn't hear what the instructor had said and asked the person next to you, he'd give you the wrong information; thus you were better off leaning over to look at his notes, but in that case he was likely to cover his notes so you couldn't see. In the labs, if you asked the person at the next bench a question, he'd tell you the wrong answer in the hope that you would make a mistake or, even better, start a fire. We were marked down for starting fires. In my year, I had the dubious distinction of starting more lab fires than anyone else, including a spectacular ether fire that set the ceiling aflame and left large scorch marks, a stigmata of ineptitude hanging over my head for the rest of the year. I was uncomfortable with the hostile and paranoid attitude this course demanded for success. I thought that a humane profession like medicine ought to encourage other values in its candidates. But nobody was asking my opinion. I got through it as best I could. I imagine medicine to be a caring profession, and a scientific one as well. It was so fast-moving that its practitioners could not afford to be dogmatic; they would be flexible and open-minded. It was certainly interesting work, and there was no doubt that you were doing something worthwhile with your life, helping sick people. So I applied to medical schools, took the Medical College Aptitude Tests, had my interviews, and was accepted. Then I got a fellowship for study in Europe, which postponed my start for a year. But the following year I went to Boston, rented an apartment in Roxbury near the Harvard Medical School, bought my furniture, and registered for my classes. And it was at the registration that I first was confronted by the prospect of dissecting a human cadaver. As first-year students, we had scrutinized the schedule and had seen that we would be given cadavers on the first day. We could talk of nothing else. We questioned the second-year students, old hands who regarded us with amused tolerance. They gave us advice. Try and get a man, not a woman. Try and get a black person, not a white. A thin person, not a fat one. And try to get one that hadn't been dead too many years. Dutifully, we made notes and waited for the fateful Monday morning. We imagined the scene, remembered how Broderick Crawford had played it in Not as a Stranger , growling at the terrified students, "There's nothing funny about death," before he whipped the cover off the corpse. In the amphitheater that morning, Don Fawcett, professor of anatomy, gave the first lecture. There was no corpse in the room. Dr. Fawcett was tall and composed, not at all like Broderick Crawford, and he spent most of the time on academic details ... Travels . Copyright © by Michael Crichton. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. Available now wherever books are sold. Excerpted from Travels by Michael Crichton All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.