The Scream of the Butterfly Author:Sean McGrath The Scream of the Butterfly is a young American's physical and spiritual journey through the initiations of adolescence - and the need during his constant moving, for an anchoring love. His long and impetuous infatuation with a beautiful Eurasian girl named Tanya ends in obsession and rejection - and his futile search for the "reasons why,"... more » in many of the wrong places. His odyssey takes him for a visit with a mysterious monk in Burma prior to the bloody revolution of 1988, on an adventure with a 'lion man' conservationist who is killed by poachers in Kenya, to an encounter with mercenaries implicated in the assassination of the president of the Comoros Islands, an orientation session with a doomsday cult and experimentation with drugs and sex in the red light district of Bangkok. During his college days in the United States he is reunited with Tanya whose eventual 'betrayal' leads to his addiction to amphetamines, rehabilitation in a psychiatric ward and a brief encounter with a radical revolutionary group. His spiritual awakening begins while on a Red Cross mission to the areas devastated by the eruption of Mt Pinatubo and his volunteer work in the Cordilleras of the Philippines, leads to a psychic healer's clinic, an encounter with the Pope on World Youth Day in Manila and culminates at a funeral pyre in the shadows of the majestic snow-capped Himalayas.« less