Travels (Google Books ⧉, Amazon ⧉, Bookshop ⧉)

Places Map

References To Other Books

Direct References

The Selected Poems of Rainer Maria Rilke

Grateful acknowledgment is made to Harper & Row Publishers, Inc., for permission to reprint an excerpt from “The Way In” from The Selected Poems of Rainer Maria Rilke.

Gulliver’s Travels

The next assignment was a paper on Gulliver’s Travels, and I remembered an essay by George Orwell that might fit.

Dante’s Inferno

On my first day at the BLI, I stepped into a world that reminded me of nothing so much as Dante’s Inferno.

All quiet on the Western Front

One day it was “All quiet on the Western Front?” and her irritating cackle.

Under a pseudonym I wrote a book called A Case of Need. It had many lightly disguised references to people in the Harvard Medical School. When the book was published, there was a lot of talk about this author, Jeffery Hudson, who seemed to know so much about Harvard. I joined right in: Who could this Hudson fellow be, anyway? What a mystery. That was fun. Then the book was nominated for an Edgar for the Best Mystery of the Year. That was fun, too. Then the book won, which meant somebody had to accept the award.

Fowler’s Modern English Usage

When I was growing up, my father was a journalist and an editor; at the dinner table there was always talk about writing, and correct word use, with frequent pauses to consult Fowler’s Modern English Usage when arguments arose.

The Andromeda Strain

Then, in my last year of school, it became publicized that I had written a book called The Andromeda Strain and sold it to the movies for a lot of money.

Franklin’s Autobiography

I reread Franklin’s Autobiography, and noted that he kept a record of himself, as I did, for exactly the same reasons.

The Hound of the Baskervilles

in such works as The Hound of the Baskervilles there is a continuous tension between a supernatural and a mundane explanation for events.

The Coming of the Fairies

then he examined the photographs, and published, in The Coming of the Fairies, his belief that the pictures of little winged people were genuine and proved fairies were real.

Book by Ram Dass

After all, when you read a book by Ram Dass, you could see he was always doing something new: living in a Zen monastery, doing breathing exercises, fasting, staying with his guru in India.

I Ching

Next Brugh introduced the I Ching, a Chinese method of divination in which you toss three coins six times, do a calculation, then look up the answer in a text. The procedure seemed mathematical and needlessly complicated. And when you got to the text, it was often not helpful: “Someone does indeed increase him; even ten tortoises cannot oppose.” Or “The well must be repaired before drawing water.” It was hard to make sense of that!

The Wizard of Oz

I couldn’t see why the floating people and animals were smiling, why they didn’t find their condition horrible, like people in the tornado in The Wizard of Oz.

Old Testament

…and the complex histories of the Old and New Testaments as historical documents;…

New Testament

…and the complex histories of the Old and New Testaments as historical documents;…

The Andromeda Strain

I was in medical school, I had gone to Florida for a couple of weeks with my wife, to dive and to revise a book I planned to call The Andromeda Strain, if it ever got finished.

Science Confronts the Paranormal

Because I knew very little of the work of CSICOP, I first read a selection of essays from The Skeptical Inquirer published in a volume called Science Confronts the Paranormal.

The Society of Mind

My friend Marvin Minsky, in a recent book, writes about mystical states in a highly critical way. He finds these states “sinister” and speaks of the “victims of these incidents.”