This book is going to take you to remote regions and crowded cities. It will take you very near Ground Zero in New York City, on the day two hijacked airliners caused two great skyscrapers to collapse and killed many people. It will take you to weddings and funerals and to parties and death museums. It will take you into courtrooms, barrooms and emergency rooms. You will meet a model and a murderer and doctors and druggies. It will take you into a boxing ring, a football match and a rock concert. It will put you on a white-knuckle plane ride and in a bus about to fall off a cliff. It will show you how to fight brush fires, search for tigers, cram for an exam and adapt to cultures where no one has ever met anyone like you before. Along the way, you will experience love, joy, hope, grief, pain and despair, like the characters in the stories, including many of the authors who chose to write from the first-person point of view. This book is about emotions and ideas; it is about humans and their condition; it is about the life around us.