Powerful read! Amazing life lessons. You can't read this book and remain unchanged.

Okay...I had to read this book for school. But WOW! It took me about a week to read it (probably would have taken less time but..well..with four kids I'm lucky to get any reading time in at all!!)

This is one of the best books I've ever read. I actually finished reading it in December but I haven't had time to write an actual review until now. (Seriously!)

This is sort of like a memoir. The author was living and working in Australia. She was a holistic physician who focused on natural healing. One day while she was out and about, she saw two young Australian Aboriginal boys huffing from aerosal spray cans. Like others who witnessed the young men, she didn't try to intervene. Then she found out later the young men died of overdosing. She decided to do something proactive.

She decided to create a foundation where she helped build a useful skill (like building and creating goods) to help build a sense of pride. That way they'd be able to support themselves and also learn how to market the products they created! What an awesome thing! The problem was, these Aboriginal young people were half white and half Aboriginal--stuck in the middle between two very different worlds and not really fitting into either. And when the Aboriginal tribe heard of her work, they summond her to them.

Now the book actually starts off with her standing in front of a hotel, dressed to the nines, waiting for her ride. She believed her ride would be a limo and her journey would be a short trip to some sort of ceremony in her honor for the work she'd done. She was wrong. A man showed up in an open jeep and drove her four hours into the Australian desert.

She met the tribe who represented the other half of the young people she'd been working with and they took her on a several month long "walkabout" to learn more about their life, culture, beliefs and how very different they are from what people believed. It wasn't just that they lived off the land, respected all living things and only took what they needed--giving back where they could--they taught the author there was alot more to life that what we allow ourselves to see.

Needless to say by the end of her journey, she was a changed woman and the tribe accepted her less a "mutant" as they believed all the rest of us to be but more a person to be celebrated.

An absolute MUST READ for anyone who feels there should be more to life than what's going on around them as well as who questions why we're all here!

If only Marlo Morgan had written this as a piece of fiction. If only she had used a fabricated tribe of fictional people. What could have been a powerful, if poorly written, piece of thought provoking fiction, disappoints, and leaves the reader feeling cheated, lied to, and even betrayed. Don't misunderstand me, there are powerful truths in this book. Truths hidden under mountains of plotholes, inflated egos, and even racism. Read this book if you must. Get what you can out of it. Just know that it is fiction.

A wonderful and insightful book about one woman's adventures in the Australian outback. The author, Marlo Morgan, ends up with a group of aborigines wandering across the wilds of Australia and,in the course of her four month journey, learns many amazing lessons on life. Australian aborigines survive in their harsh environment by cooperating with, rather than taking advantage of, nature and they have a level of wisdom that "western society" could learn a great deal from. Get this book; you'll love it