"Each time I leave home I seem to go in search of something--call it a bo tree, or Shangri-La, or paradise--which is only another name for peace itself and these days decidedly a fool's errand."
So writes Helen Bevington in "The World and the Bo Tree, " a book that describes her travels taken amid the turbulence of the 1980s. The "world" of the title is the one everybody knows, a fairly troubled, even threatening place to inhabit these days. The bo tree, which has flourished for centuries in India and Asia, is itself a meaningful symbol of peace, since under it the Buddha sat when he...

In this autobiographical volume, the remarkable Helen Bevington looks for answers to the question of how to live or, more specifically, how to confront growing older. A familiar face on the literary landscape since the mid-1940s, Bevington contemplates the course of her own life in view of the suicide of her father, the final years her mother spent in unwilling solitude, and the tragic suicide of her son following a crippling automobile accident from which he could never recover. How is one to face the inevitability of death? What is the third alternative? How to persevere in life?
The...