"Because they claim superior wisdom, gurus sometimes invent a background of mystery. Travels to parts of Central Asia or Tibet inaccessible to ordinary mortals have, in the past, been promoted as prologues to the acquisition of esoteric knowledge and mystical experiences. Now that most of the world is mapped, explored, and, like Everest, cluttered with western rubbish, it is harder to find places which are sufficiently remote to be mysterious. But there are always other worlds. Perhaps other planets are inhabited by creatures of infinite wisdom who send messages to selected mortals? Some gurus appear to believe so."
From Feet of Clay
By Anthony Storr
Free Press, $24, ISBN 0684828189
From The Awakening Heart
From Citizen Perot:
From My Usual Game:
From Golf Dreams:
"Now that I am securely married, I often think back to my bachelor days, indulging in this candy store of my imagination an occasional mental infidelity with an ex-girlfriend who will come around to haunt me for a few days. I will picture her face or skin, recall a scent, try to revive the shock her beauty gave me the first time she undressed; or else the opposite, certain annoying tics, dry Sunday brunches, her betrayals or my cruelties. Lately I have been thinking about Claire. I find her floating in my consciousness more than others who had far more connection with me. Perhaps the very fact that ours was a middling affair makes me brood about her, as over an unsolved riddle. But more likely, it is simply because she died young."
From Portrait of My Body
©1996, ProMotion, inc.
"At the time of my death, I left my body and traveled through a tunnel that stretches between earth and our heavenly home. I was drawn toward a figure of brilliant, radiant light, whom I recognized as my savior, Jesus Christ. I was reunited with loved ones who had passed on before me, and I saw the spirit of my daughter who was yet to be born. I experienced a taste of the life beyond."
My Continuing Journey to Love
By Betty J. Eadie
Pocket Books, $20, ISBN 0671558684
"Unknown beyond a small circle at the company was that [Ross] Perot's apparently conventional car (a black four-door Chevrolet Caprice) was a special bombproof vehicle, protected by bullet-resistant Kevlar. 'It had everything,' recalls Tom Marquez, who had helped arrange the order together with Perot's aide Merv Stauffer. 'It had places for guns, pits where you could shoot, and a double battery. It looked just like a normal car, except when you got to a tollbooth, you had to open the door to give them the money because the windows were so thick you couldn't roll them down. Ross was like a kid in a candy store when we gave him that car.'"
His Life and Times
By Gerald Posner
Random House, $25, ISBN 0679447318
"Golf is a literate game. The list of golf's distinguished chroniclers is impressively long: Bernard Darwin, P.G. Wodehouse, Henry Longhurst, Grantland Rice, Herbert Warren Wind, Peter Dobereiner, Dan Jenkins, George Plimpton, John Updike, among many others. The game lends itself to metaphor and reflection, and it has the great distinction among professional sports of being both played and covered by people who, by and large, went to college. Football is more fun to watch than to read about; baseball is more fun to read about than to watch. Golf, in contrast to both, is equally interesting in fact and on paper, and it has the further advantage of being a game that is actually played by its fans. Indeed, one reason golf writing in general is so good is that many of the people who cover the game are themselves avid players. Golf pros, golf writers, and golf fans share a huge body of common experience and knowledge. The only thing I find disappointing is that virtually all of them voted for George Bush."
Adventures in Golf
By David Owen
Main Street Books/
Doubleday, $12.95, ISBN 0385483384
"Many men are more faithful to their golf partners than to their wives, and have stuck with them longer. The loyalty we feel toward our chronic consorts in golf acquires naturally the mystical and eternal overtones that the wedding hopefully, and often vainly, invokes. What is the secret? Structure, I would answer: the golf foursome is constructed with clear and limited purposes denied the nebulously grand and insatiable goals of the marriage twosome."
Writings on Golf
By John Updike
Alfred A. Knopf, $23, ISBN 0679450580
By Phillip Lopate
Anchor Books, $22.95, 0385477104
www@bookpage.com