Huston Smith was raised by Christian missionary parents in Suchow, China during the rise of the revolutionary Sun Yat-sen and the Chinese Communist Party. On April 25, 1945, Huston obtained one of the rare public tickets to attend the first meeting of the United Nations. He invited Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. to Washington University in 1956 - between King's Montgomery, Alabama bus boycott and his historic March on Washington. The next year, the university integrated. In the 60s, he was in Cambridge at MIT doing hallucinogens with Timothy Leary and discussing metaphysics with Ram Dass and Andrew Weil. On a trip to Tanzania, Smith would be rescued from lions in the Serengeti Plains by Massai warriors who took him to the encampment of the world-famous archeologists Louis and Mary Leakey for safekeeping (and a much needed glass of whiskey). Later Smith would meet the Dalai Lama in Northern India (30 years before His Holiness would be discovered by Hollywood and the West), go nearly psychotic while practicing meditation in the most demanding Zen monastery in Kyoto, and just happen to be in a taxicab in Tiananmen Square when the student protests of 1989 broke out. He's climbed Mt. Athos, he's gone to Washington, DC to defend the Native American Church's right to use peyote in their rituals, and he's recorded multiphonic chanting with Tibetan Monks and Mickey Hart of the Grateful Dead. One after another Smith encounters and engages with the people who shaped the twentieth century.