Huston Smith's experience with world religions began almost at birth: He was born in Soochow, China, in 1919, the son of Methodist missionary parents. He began his career as a college religion professor in the mid-1940s, but from the start, his interest was more than academic: He not only studied but practiced Vedanta Hinduism, Zen Buddhism, and Sufism, each for more than a decade. Tales of Wonder, his autobiography, covers his extraordinarily active and long life. Obviously, Smith is no shut-in; in his book, he describes encounters with Mother Teresa, Aldous Huxley, Reinhold Niebuhr, J. Robert Oppenheimer, Saul Bellow, Eleanor Roosevelt, Martin Luther King Jr., and a host of others.