A little bit more autobiography: a book that changed my life

I wrote this for an essay content at the New York Times, but they didn't use it.

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On November 10, 1955 our Vallejo High School honor society made a field trip to San Francisco. After the formal program they turned us loose on Market Street for a few hours.

In the Bonanza Inn Book Shop I paid 10 cents for a used copy of Norman Cousins' Modern Man Is Obsolete. A charming handwritten letter taped inside indicated it had been a Stanford professor's wedding present to a former student 10 years earlier. I always wonder what happened to that marriage to put this book in that store that very day.

The book expanded an editorial Cousins wrote for the Saturday Review Of Literature immediately after the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It argued powerfully that continued world anarchy would produce atomic catastrophe and that we urgently needed a world government.

Overwhelmed, I changed my intended college major from physics to political science so I could work for peace in a diplomatic career. I didn't want to contribute to potentially dangerous technological progress when world political systems couldn't cope with the "progress" we had already made.

Thanks to another change in plans, I ended up teaching political science at Adrian College for 36 years.