Reviews

"These beautiful picaresque forays into the mind of the world manage
to stand still and stand for themselves--as evidence that we belong to one place--a seat of imagination made real by the storytellers, architects, painters, musicians, and mystics Tillinghast encounters. He brings to his sojourns a brilliant eye, a friendly soul, and eclectic knowledge of a variety of disparate areas--Civil War history, Venetian architectures, Eastern cultures, Irish music, and the ways of out-of-the-way people."
--Philip Brady, author of By Heart: Reflections of a Rust Belt BardTillinghast's prose is beautifully crafted throughout, which, in itself, might sufficiently reward the reader for accompanying this peripatetic pied piper on his extended world journey. But Tillinghast's depth of knowledge in subject areas ranging from theology, ethnology, sociology, architecture, art, and history establish him as a true renaissance man."--David Brill, author of As Far As the Eye Can See: Reflections of an Appalachian Trail Hiker "An Irish abbot in a monastery in Regensburg, Germany in the twelfth century dispatched two local carpenters to Ireland to help the Irish king Cormac McCarthy to build a chapel. Richard Tillinghast hunted down the ruined church on a stormy day. Here is his sentence about it: "Its steeply pitched roof, blind arcading, and square twin towers on either side of the junction of nave and chapel, if they could talk, would speak German." For armchair travel, one could hardly do better than Richard Tillinghast. To the Hilo coast in Hawaii, to Nepal and India, rural Ireland, to London at Christmas and to the river towns of Tennessee and the story of his particular South, he brings a remarkable combination of erudition, wit, curiosity, and a limpid, wry, sometimes startling prose."--Robert Hass "Whether old haunts or new ones, Richard Tillinghast is the best of fellow pilgrims, commingling, as he does, scholarship and erudition, a poet's word-smithing and sentence making, with heart and humanity deepened in his travels. He finds, in distant places and in different people, the exotic treasure and the familiars of home. Journeys into the Mind of the World is first class booking, a welcome aboard for a remarkable ride." --Thomas Lynch