leonidasalves

The book’s called Travels. It was shelved in the travel section of the bookstore. The cover photos show the author hiking with a backpack, posing with an African tribesman, scuba diving. It’s not a leap to assume from all this that Michael Crichton had written a book of travel essays. That’s where you’d be wrong. In fact, Travels opens with the line, “It is not easy to cut through a human head with a hacksaw.” The first 80 pages of the book cover Crichton’s four years of medical school, where he fended off a nympho psych patient, wondered about the mental component in the timing of heart attacks, and watched the malpractice errors of the senior doctors without feeling he could challenge them. By the end of the section, he’s written The Andromeda Strain and been whisked off to Hollywood to discuss the film. More than 100 pages into the book, the actual traveling begins: in Bangkok, where Crichton discovers just how little he knows about the world. Along the way, an expatriate investment banker takes him on a tour of the fabled nightlife, ending at a brothel of prepubescent girls. While Crichton doesn’t partake of the offerings (at least, not in this report), he also doesn’t try to dissuade his host or leave in a huff. It’s an odd moment, true Morbid Curiosity material, without the self-exploration one expects. Crichton reports on several other adventures where he pushes himself farther and farther from his comfort zone — swimming with sharks, climbing Kilimanjaro, sleeping amongst elephants in Kenya — before slipping into the heart of the book: psychic exploration. This ties back into the first section of the book, where he visited a Hollywood psychic before making the movie Westworld. In London he consults the Spiritualist Association of Great Britain, which he refers to as the psychic smorgasbord. From that point on, he attends a meditation conference in the California desert, where he studies with a cactus. He learns to see auras, travel astrally, and bend spoons. He channels spirits. Throughout it all, Crichton is unafraid to depict himself as unlikable. He not only questions everything, he’s hostile about it. He’s petty and unkind. He doesn’t accept generosity graciously. He goes through women like Kleenex. Still, the journeys he undertakes, the explorations he makes are entertaining reading. Whether you’re a fan of the author of Jurassic Park and Twister or not, Crichton covers interesting territory in Travels.

2023-01-06 21:22