Is our era both the most wondrous and the most horrific time ever to be alive in the history of the human race?

Award-winning travel journalist Lee Foster thinks so. His audiobook, Travels in an American Imagination: The Spiritual Geography of Our Time consists of 25 essays, in which Foster evokes a place in his worldwide travels and then addresses the spiritual geography of our era.

Foster's work has won eight Lowell Thomas Awards, the highest accolades in travel writing, including him being named Travel Journalist of the Year (Silver Winner). More than 200 of his worldwide coverages can be seen at fostertravel.com.

Foster suggests that a balanced perception of modern life, with sufficient imagination, can enable a modern person to live in a healthy, constructive manner and not be overwhelmed by pessimism or despair.

Modern life is defined by the constant media or actual-life barrage of polar positive and negative experiences on the average informed person. Those seeking an inner peace need to balance these assaults on their sensibilities through a deeper understanding of the current human drama.

Foster views modern life with an unflinching clarity. For example, in his chapter "Brazil: The Decline of the Environment," he describes the experience of walking in a perishing rain forest with its irreversible loss of species. Yet Foster balances this encounter with the wondrous, as in "Canaveral: The Adventure of Space Flight," in which he celebrates that we put a man on the moon, no small feat, in his lifetime.