The widely acclaimed novelist, essayist, and cultural and social critic is one of the characters in these ten striking pieces, each of which is part memoir, part short story, part sharp observation of the world today. This is a book about contemporary travelers in far-flung places, about the inner compulsion to travel, and about the condition of being a traveler. For the past ten years, Diane Johnson has roamed the world from Taipei to Tanzania to Teheran, from St. Petersburg and Bangkok to Delhi and the Great Barrier Reef. In these pieces she answers dramatically, and with a constantly refreshing wit, the question of why we travel and how travel changes us. In Switzerland, the travelers' willingness to face danger in the name of adventure is made clear as a festive midnight toboggan ride turns into a terrifying slide through a pathless forest ... in London, the author's physician husband discovers that the patient whose life he is. In the middle of saving is an international drug lord ... en route from her daughter's wedding in Paris to her son's in Taipei, the author glimpses a Russia she thought no longer existed. Full of humor and with a nonstop storytelling pull, Natural Opium is a new kind of travel book, pure Diane Johnson.