Book excerpt: "'What does one learn by taking a journey, any journey?' Helen Bevington asks. 'I've taken a shaky trip through a decade (to Russia, to the mailbox, to bed) to the end of the 1970s, about which uncomplimentary and increasingly anxious remarks were made by us all--you, me, and the media.' This is a book of journeys, to places--Russia, Hawaii, Italy, Yugoslavia, Greece, the South Seas, the Rhine, Australia, New Zealand, New Mexico--and to the classroom at Duke University where she was Professor of English until her retirement in 1976. Since everything is a journey, the book is concerned with travel of all kinds, in books, in memories, in people living and dead, a lighthearted search for Eden on this planet but a more serious search for survival in the troubled decade of the 1970s"--Publisher.