ALL THAT'S HOLY: A Young Guy, an Old Car, and the Search for God in America

Wry, poignant, insightful and balanced, this travelogue is a keen first effort by Harvard Divinity School graduate Levinson, who embarked on a self-imposed pilgrimage of three months and 9,000 miles in a 1994 Nissan "traveling laboratory." Daunted by the scope of his own ambition, Levinson's business cards stated his mission and bolstered himself as the "Project Director" of "God Is: An Oral History of Faith in America." Armed with a cell phone, tape recorder and list of potential contacts, he traversed the landscape, initiating profound conversations in often unlikely places with likely and unlikely subjects such as southwestern U.S. Sikhs, converted Hasidic Jews, Wiccans in the Army, Texas evangelicals and Yorubans in a South Carolina roadside attraction, among nearly 100 others. Levinson's fluid style connects these rapid-fire interludes, beguiling the reader to peer with him into a cultural kaleidoscope of a gloriously pluralized religious landscape. A superb storyteller, Levinson's book lures like the very routes that beckoned him, where way leads on to way, path leads on to path. His insights about truth, tradition, choice and empathy arise in part from the road trip's powerful juxtapositions. For example, because he is a Jew, from the story of Moses he understood the Navajo tribal need to rely on a core of elders for community leadership. Coming to a just conclusion that "there is no going it alone," Levinson's thoughtful adventure proffers much hope and understanding for anyone interested in contemporary American culture. (Sept.)