In this scholarly, cross-cultural, and interdisciplinary study, Robert M. Torrance, professor of comparative literature at the University of California, Davis, explores the spiritual quest as an activity grounded in biology, psychology, and language and expressed in various self-transformative processes "irreducible to a single fixed paradigm." The author, with great verve and authority, presents the search for transcendence through myths, rites of passage, spirit possession, and shamanism. His discussion of Native American vision quests in the last section of the book is quite impressive. The Spiritual Quest makes a good case for "the creative process par excellence, the process by which human beings continually remake themselves in accord with goals forever beyond them."