Alison Wright, a photojournalist who documented traditions of endangered cultures, wrote books of photography and published many magazine articles. She won the Dorothea Lange Award in Documentary Photography, the North American Travel Journalism Award, and twice the Lowell Thomas Travel Journalism Award.

This memoir combines her many world-wide travel adventures with her remarkable survival and lengthy painful recovery from a bus accident on a remote mountain road in Laos. The damage to her body was so severe that nobody believed she would survive. During many hours of excruciating pain while waiting for medical care she felt close to death but “concentrated on every breath as if it would be my last.” She gives credit to the breathing technique she learned from years of Buddhist meditation, which also allowed her to accept her pain and the death she expected. Her remarkable survival was followed by months of surgeries and physical therapy. She never believed the many doctors who told her she would be unable to return to her previous very-active life, involving outdoor activities that her damaged lungs and heart couldn’t stand, such as climbing high mountains. But she set a goal to climb Mount Kilimanjaro on her fortieth birthday, which she managed to achieve. Later she was able to complete the 33-mile circumambulation of Mount Kailash, the holiest peak in Tibet for Buddhists.

Alison Wright's story of accident and slow recovery is interspersed with stories of many previous travels, including meeting the Dalai Lama and Burma’s Aung San Suu Kyi. These stories were short diversions. To my great disappointment, the crucial story of her emotional and spiritual recovery was far less developed as was that of her physical recovery. I read her memoir mainly for the former since most of the year I spent in the hospital involved frequent breathing problems – I had to learn to breathe again and to adjust to the new lifestyle imposed by my permanent neurological damage. But her story of her nearly full recovery is very inspiring, albeit it spiritually incomplete. She has had a remarkable life.