Tom Phillips on “A Beginner’s Life”

As a journalist, Tom Phillips covered the turbulent second half of the 20th century from New York, Moscow, Prague, Beijing, South Africa and Somalia. As a seeker, he hitch-hiked across America, rode the rails to the four corners of India, sat with a Japanese Zen master, and encountered Christianity on a subway escalator. That’s just the surface of this engaging memoir, both a panorama of history and a personal account of a beginner’s life—one adventure after another.