This isn't really a travel book. Or, rather, it's not a pure travel book; if anything, it's a memoir in which the author's travels are a major subject, along with his experience as medical student during the sixties and his belief in 'psychic phenomena'.

Despite expecting a book solely about travels, I found the author's account of his medical experiences to be the most interesting part of the book. Many of the methods and attitudes of doctors in the sixties seem callous by contemporary standards. By contrast, the actual travel sections are more frustrating. They are too brief, to start, more vignettes than full-bodied accounts.

There's also something grating about Crichton's tendency to turn the focus of the account inwards, towards himself and his inner experiences. Rather than he focusing on the lives and culture of the locals he meets, Crichton tends to dwell on the personal lessons he drew from the incidents that occur while travelling, or, even more banal, the implications of his travels on his relationships at the time. In fact, quite a significant portion of the book is spend alluding to and dissecting the reasons for the breakdowns of Crichton's relationships with women, which often occur while travelling.

The psychic parts... to be honest I skipped these. They don't interest me. I suspect Crichton is displaying here the same contrarian streak that led him to deny climate change.

Like virtually all kids of my generation, I was obsessed with Jurassic Park, the movie. Having finished what is effectively the creator's memoir, I am a little disappointed. I found the author to be a bit self-involved and a bit overly contrarian; not unbearable, but a little grating. It was also frustrating that, despite the title, only 2/3rds of the book was actually about travels.

One of my favorite memoirs by an author. I've read this book at least four or five times.

Crichton's inner thoughts made me very uncomfortable. I liked his story about being in Medical school, but the traveling sections weren't so great.

[from my blog: http://blog.whistledance.net/2004/09/... ]

Travels is a book that has been recommended to me for a while and I finally got around to reading it before and during my Costa Rica trip. This is by the same Michael Crichton that wrote Jurassic Park, Andromeda Strain, etc. but this book is more autobiographical than fictional. It was extremely different from what I expected, but I think I ended up loving it even more because of that. Which is, of course, why I should remember not to put too much weight on expectations.

The book doesn't even begin with much traveling. The first 80 pages or so are all about going through med school. (Did you even know he was a doctor? I sure didn't.) I figured I was going to get bored and just slog through that part, but it turned out to be fascinating. The chapter called "A Day at the BLI" was about different women's experiences in the delivery room, and packed more punch per page than anything I had read in a while. It was also interesting to read about how he views our responsibility towards our own health, and how we affect it by our mental and emotional states, as well as our physical states.

After med school, he gets to the actual traveling part of the book, which tends to be pretty adventure-oriented travel: climbing Mt. Kilimanjaro, scuba diving with sharks, crossing a landslide in Pakistan, etc. But after a bit, you realize that there's more going on than just scooting around the world. There's a lot of self-observation happening, too, particularly regarding relationships with the various women going through his life at these times.

Also as the book progresses, he starts exploring different types of experiences as well. When staying in London, he visits the Spiritualist Association of Great Britain nearly every day, evaluating the different psychics there and trying to determine the validity of the phenomena he observes. Later, he goes to meditation conferences, and energy work sessions, and learns to see auras. Some of this material is more fascinating to me than the stuff that I expected the book to be about. I particularly recommend the chapter on "Cactus Teachings." The postscript to the book is the text of a talk (never delivered) to the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal, about why he believes there is some validity to certain psychic phenomena.

 Διαβάστε και ελληνική κριτική στις βιβλιοαλχημείες.

I promise! This is the last Crichton for this month. In October I'll have 4 and by November until next August just 1.

This book was a surprise. I was expecting it to be a wonderful experience but it turned out to be my worst Crichton!

Yes! I admit it. I, a huge fan of Crichton who has read 30 of his books hated some parts of this book.
Well, shit happens.

This book had 2 surprises.
By the title I assumed the obvious.
That this was going to be travel writing, all about Crichton's travels in exotic places.
All about Crichton's adventures in dangerous places.

But the 1st part consisting of 80 pages was all about his medical years, at Harvard University.
And I was sure I was going to be disappointed.
Surprise number 1. This 1st part was my favourite and the most interesting.

The 2nd part was all about his travels BUT only 17/28 chapters were the actual travels, the physical ones around the world.
The other 11 were chapters about mysticism, yoga, tarot, spoon bending, auras, astral protections, astrology, chakras and other spiritual mumbo jumbo shite.
Surprise number 2
I felt cheated!

I wanted more about his actual travels, hiking in Pakistan, mountain climbing in Kilimanjaro, snorkelling with sharks, tracking gorillas in Congo, filming in Ireland, but no.
He wrote a 20+ pages chapter about people shooting energy from their fingertips as if they were Darth Sidious. And I was like: "What the fuck am I reading?!

20 pages of shit like this and only 3! pages about the Mayan ruins in Mexico.
If I exclude the spiritual travels, this was a decent book about Crichton's experiences at Harvard Medical School, his travels around the world and his personal life, (his bad relationship with his father and the absence of grief during his funeral (a tough chapter to read), his first divorce etc.)

I didn't care if he believed in auras, in divination, in spoon bending, in astral experiences, and of course I wasn't persuaded by his 20+ pages postscript titled Sceptics at Cal Tech were he tries to show the relationship between (real)science and pseudo(science) and shed some truth on the latter one. I wasn't convinced.

I wanted more about his Medical Years, more about his Physical Travels, more about his Personal life and much less than his Spiritual 'Travels'.

Interesting glimpses into the famed author's experiences

I would say that this is my all-time, favorite book.

2003 Jan 01

The book that proves just how astoundingly credulous a physician can be.

The title is a bit misleading,this book is not entirely about travel,but a variety of subjects.

Crichton starts off with his difficult relationship with his father and not feeling any grief when his father died.

In addition to travel,the book is also about his medical career and the least interesting part to me was his belief in psychics.

An intrepid traveler,the places he chooses to visit are fairly unusual and show his fondness for adventure.

Of particular interest to me were the two chapters dealing with his travel experiences in Pakistan's Northern areas.

He travels the dangerous Karakoram Highway and finds it blocked by a massive landslide,somehow managing to get to the other side.He also finds himself in trouble on a mountain trail, but survives.

Searching for the mythical Shangri La,he visits remote Hunza in Pakistan only to find that its inhabitants are not as healthy,happy and long lived as he expected.

The second trip to Pakistan takes him to Baltistan and the Karokoram mountains which contain ten of the highest peaks in the world.The account of how local women treat his blonde wife is hilarious.

Other trips in the book take him to Mount Kiliminjaro,Rwanda,New Guinea,Malaysia and Bangkok. He describes his experiences with gorillas and sharks.

He goes to the Mayan pyramids and also describes his encounter with a three hundred pound turtle,which is laying eggs.In Bangkok he is taken by his friend to see a child brothel.

The most interesting part of his recollections about his medical career is his experience of dissecting a human cadaver and his initial unease in dissecting it.But eventually,he would cut through the head of the cadaver, and become pretty good at it.

In another chapter he describes the agony of screaming women about to give birth under the influence of drugs.It was a common practice during his early medical career,and rich women were "assisted" in giving birth using drugs.

Unhappy as a doctor,he would eventually quit to become a writer.His Harvard teacher didn't think much of his writing skills and he submitted an essay by George Orwell as his own.Orwell got a B- grade,too !

He also talks about working in movies as a director,once directing Sean Connery in stunts which were quite dangerous.That movie was based on his book,The Great Train Robbery.

The third part about his belief in psychics was of little interest to me.I skipped it.

The book is a mixed bag,though it's very personal and parts of it are very intense and interesting.

Michael Crichton was a good writer - of fiction. In this book the writing is thoroughly pedestrian, more like journalism than anything else (good journalism, that is - the reporting of who, what, where, when, and how - rather than the political propaganda that passes for reporting these days). It's flat, dull, even tedious.

And the content is worse, at least cumulatively. This book isn't so much about what Crichton did and what he saw as it is about his problems. Now I don't doubt that his problems were real - but I don't care to read, ad infinitum ad nauseam, about this difficulty and that problem and the other thing that's wrong.

Moreover, here we see one of the great problems with modern thinking. Crichton rejects out of hand anything Christian - it doesn't make sense to him, and that's as far as he'll go. But when New Age ideas and phenomena come along, even if he's initially skeptical he winds up giving them a fair try, perhaps bending over backwards and being more than fair. He won't accept anything the Bible says, but he'll accept just about anything some guru tells him. It might take him a while, but he at least listens - yet he won't even pretend to listen to the Bible. That sort of religious bigotry isn't at all new - Jesus got it from the Jews, and Paul from the Romans and Greeks - but it is disappointing, and after reading pages and pages of it, irritating.

I got as far as page 346, and quit. I just couldn't take it anymore. It's not that I disagree with Crichton's views - I've read, with pleasure, any number of books where the author and I disagreed vehemently. It's that I can only tolerate so much whining and so much bigotry before I despair of the author ever getting his mind right.

I enjoyed Chrichton’s essays about both his world adventure travels and his inner travels exploring the psychic and spiritual worlds. His spare, self-deprecating style made me smile at situations he got into and he set the tone right from the start with schoolboy tales of his Harvard education to become a doctor. I also admired his bright mind and curiosity-driven gumption as he pursued “direct experiences”. The final essay on the validity of research into parapsychology is impressive as he demonstrates why we need the observations of both the mystic and the scientist. The two need not be opposed.

I loved this book. I like that it also included spiritual travel as well as physical travel. A very interesting read!