Paul Theroux Books

Simply wish to say item arrived in acceptable amount of time and was in good condition. I'm very happy to have access to the purchase of difficult-to-find items.

I enjoyed the volumes before and after this one immensely, and only bought this one with reluctance. I was correct in my misgivings.

While many of the pieces are quite good, I did find a monotonous repetition in the style of the pieces. Hearty adventurer finds some remote location, undertakes a manly man's activity (even when a woman) and reports on it with an affected sarcasm or wryness or ennui style. Ho-hum. Doesn't Theroux write entire books like this? Maybe I've just read too much of his works to like the derivatives.

Thankfully, I skipped those pieces to read the good ones (even good ones that fit the above mode -- like Philip Capute's piece about looking for lions while on safari). Those jewels made me glad to buy this volume, even though I skipped the bulk of the pieces.

Of course, if you LIKE gonzo-style travel writing, then this is the volume for you. Buy it and enjoy.

What is there to add here? It's the best from last year. Some of the essays were about things I didn't care about, like a tedious thing on wine, but I just skipped those. The ones I was into, I was really into.

I like travel literature, and I've enjoyed Paul Theroux's books, so I thought I'd try this book. I read the 2000 version of Best American Travel literature, which really reflects Bill Bryson's writing style. And true to my expectations, this version reflects Paul Theroux's style. The articles are more political, more edgy, more depressing, just like Theroux. It's superb writing though, while not always light, so you should expect to take on some of the more 'heady' travel topics in this volume. Theroux really has stuck to his own style in choosing the stories that make up this book. A really good set of stories though.

Anyone who's read Paul Theroux's travel books - "The Old Patagonian Express," "The Happy Isles of Oceania" - knows he's not in it for the fun. His selections for the best travel pieces of 2000 (for this 2001 edition), reflect his seriousness of purpose, his sense of place and his eye for quality writing. "It is not about vacations," he states in his introduction, and explains, "travel writing at its best relates a journey of discovery that is frequently risky and sometimes grim and often pure horror, with a happy ending: to hell and back."

This book is not about places you want to go to. It's about the world, much of it remote, in its workaday, sometimes hostile, raiment. Taken from a wide variety of magazines and newspapers, presented in alphabetical order (with contributor notes in the back), these essays consider the reflective traveler's relation to unfamiliar places, people, and events.

There are contemplative journeys: Russell Banks' strange encounter at the top of the Andes; Scott Anderson's brotherly competition for dangerous destinations; Lawrence Millman's lighthearted sojourn on the Mediterranean island of Pantelleria; Janet Malcolm's search for Chekhov in the places he wrote about; Edward Said's grim "Paradise Lost," recalling his idyllic childhood in the Lebanese hills, now buried in rubble.

There are anthropological adventures like Gretel Ehrlich's long dog-sled hunt with the Inuit in Greenland and there are adventures touched with politics and history, like Philip Caputo's travels among the man-eating lions of Kenya, Tim Cahill's trip to Ecuador's erupting volcanoes (and their villages) and David Quammen's winter search for the wolves in post-communist Romania.

Journalistic pieces tell us the things we don't know, the things we should know. Michael Finkel's "Desperate Passage" places him among a leaky boatload of desperate Haitians hoping for America, and Susan Minot relates a tangled, ugly history as she introduces us to children kidnapped by rebels in Uganda. Andrew Cockburn visits the "new" Iran, Patrick Symmes searches out the guerrillas in Columbia. There are portraits of places, politics and loneliness like Peter Hessler's story of the inept burglar on the China/Korea border and Susan Orlean's portrait of Khao San Road in Bangkok.

In a category all its own is Salman Rushdie's eloquent, emotionally nuanced "A Dream of Glorious Return," the story of his first trip back to India since the publication of "The Satanic Verses" twelve years before. His 20-year-old son, Zafar (who has never read his father's books) accompanies him and Rushdie, ebullient with homecoming rapture, attempts to see the country through Zafar's fresh (often appalled) perspective as well as his own. It's a piece full of joy and sadness and political tension, beautifully told.

There is humor in many of these pieces but hilarity is not Theroux's first interest. These essays will appeal to those looking for an armchair view of the world's niches, many of them ugly. Without exception the writing is clear and vivid, and the writer's eye intelligent and unpretentious.

In 1935, in the first flush of success of his first acclaimed novel, Greene took off to explore the concept of Africa, building on his notions of adventure from childhood reading. Identifying never-colonized Liberia as the most authentically uncivilized of African destinations, he set off, with his 23-year-old female cousin, a troop of native bearers and virtually no knowledge or experience of trekking. His four weeks of walking a twelve-inch path through the Liberian wilds, stopping at villages overnight, makes an interesting and engaging account, never sentimentalized, and with much thoughtful insight. He gives plentiful narrative detail, but always is overwhelmingly concerned with the psychic reverberations of Africa, and his perceptions of primitivism, in his own life and outlook. He is not unaware of the irony of his deliberate quest for un-self-consciousness flowing from external reflections on the "natural" human world. This book is an interesting counterpoint to observations of modern-day Liberia, for which progress over the ensuing seven decades remains elusive. A few more of the roads have been paved, but most of the country remains bare soil, now soaked in more blood and mayhem than the quaint natives and masked, raffia-skirted tribal "devils" of 1935 could have dreamed of.

This book provides and excellent background about traveling in the country of Liberia during the mid-19th century. A well written and interesting travelogue.

I've read a number of Greene's novels, but this little travel book was equal to his other publications. As usual, his attention to detail, people, and culture creates wonderful images that bring us right to the Liberia of the 1930s. I shared the book with my sister who lived in Liberia for 27 yrs. and she was astonished at the accurate reporting. His prose is the best I've read for a book devoted to travel experiences.

Graham Greene was weary and appalled by the world atrocities of the early 20th century. He decided to go looking for life as basic and unspoiled as it was in the beginning. He chose to do so in Liberia, the African nation that had always been under black rule and not colonized or fleeced by Europe in modern times, though even it was a western construct, carved out of the continent by Americans as a homeland to repatriate freed slaves (or, as Greene says, a place to hide mulatto offspring). His trek on foot lasted the month of February 1935, and JOURNEY WITHOUT MAPS is his account of what became a transformative experience.

The title is derived from the fact that there were no true maps available of Liberia at the time. He relied on a caravan of native porters and a lot of guestimations as to what direction and how far it would be from village to village. Once leaving the ragged European communities near the coast, he and his party plunged into that virgin world he sought. What he describes in exquisite detail is now familiar to us via decades of National Geographics but was then, to someone who had never left Europe at that point, a culture shock. He learned to leave behind his English insistence on time table and surprise at naked, ritually scarred bodies, the persistent sound of drums and the utter poverty of villages. He did not let go his own clothes or whiskey or discomfort over rats and insects. He is eventually waylaid by sickness, and in the healing process comes out with a new, more life affirming personal vision. Though it seems as if the details of the daily marches, the insects and discomforts are so much of the same, by the end you see the impact of the experience. He found what he went looking for and more, and he was not afraid to leave some mysteries unsolved.

Greene's prose is clear as a bell and graceful. His observations of contemporary politics and missionaries, as well as the elasticity of truth in such a setting are valuable today, even seasoned with his candid biases.

Graham Greene is a famous 20th C novelist ("The Orient Express") who also wrote a few travel accounts. This is his first, when he was 31 years old and left Europe for the first time in his life to experience the uncivilized "dark heart of Africa" by traveling through the back country of Liberia in 1935. It was a 4-week, 350-mile walk, mostly through an unchanging tunnel forest path, ending each day in a primitive village. He had about a dozen black porters who would carry him in a sling, although he walked much of the way.

It's written with a very "old school" perspective, with one foot in the 19th (or 18th) century of romantic colonial imperialism, and one foot in the pre-war 1930s perspective of deterioration, rot and things falling apart. Heavy whiskey drinking, descriptions of the festering diseases of the natives, and plethora of bothersome insects, the run down European outposts and a motley cast of white rejects fill many descriptive pages.

It reminds me a lot of Samuel Johnson's "Journals of the Western Isles" (1770s) when Johnson, who had never left England in his life, decided to go to Scotland to see what uncivilized people were like. Just as Johnson brought Boswell who would go on to write his own version of the trip, Greene brought his female cousin Barbara Greene (who remains unnamed in the book and largely unmentioned), who went on to write her own version of the trip in the 1970s called "Too Late to Turn Back", which mostly contradicts Grahams version.

I can't say I totally enjoyed this book, I found Greene's attitude irritating - but therein lies its value, as a snapshot of prewar European zeitgeist. It is reminiscent of "Kabloona" (1940), another prewar travel account to an uncivilized place (Arctic Eskimos) by a young European aristocrat, who also is deeply inward looking and finds a new perspective and appreciation for the "cave man" people he meets. It's very much a transition period between prewar and post-war attitudes and the fluctuation's back and forth, the sense of things falling apart, but also new-found perspective, make it a challenging but interesting work.

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Actually, this edition has two novellas - "Dr. Slaughter" neing the basis for the film of the same name. After seeing the dissappointing film, I was unexpectedly shocked to discover how I could be absorbed by amoral heroine and her challenges. Mostly, this is thanks to Paul Theroux's crisp and inviting prose. While today's authors repeatedly assure us of their expert credentials in writing technothrillers, political thrillers, historical fiction, legal thrillers and so on, only Paul Theroux triumphs on an endless and rariefied reservoir of dissassociation, being an alien and an outsider. Dr. Slaughter, a brilliant and beautiful specialist in petro-economics, is already well versed in using sexual favors to supplement a meager income when she becomes "an escort". Using her dissassociation as a shield against the monumental dreariness of her existence (her miserable flat in London seems perpetually frozen), she prospers, never realizing her proximity to the true love that eludes her or the danger she places others into. The revelation at the end seems no surprise, yet packs an emotional wallop.

This novel was adapted into a movie starring Sigourney Weaver about an escort girl's adventures in Europe.

Paul Theroux is one of those authors that I find myself returning to again and again over the years. Though my own days of careless travel seem to be largely behind me, it is pure pleasure reading Theroux's cynical and insightful views on foreign travel and culture and his encounters with fellow travelers and locals never fail to amuse. RIDING THE IRON ROOSTER does not disappoint.

As in all of his travel books, the most interesting and engaging character often is Theroux himself. Fussy and pretentious at times and never romantic, he is also refreshingly judgmental, while generally avoiding the chauvinism common with Western writers and travelers. Like Somerset Maugham, he is a man of the world, yet unlike Maugham, his biases and complaints are personal rather than nationalistic. We can usually identify with his trials and frustrations and share in his annoyances.

The Chinese are a curious and foreign people and I have always found them difficult to relate to and inscrutable. Theroux perfectly captures the feeling of strangeness that being amongst them evokes, though oddly enough it is the Americans and Europeans he encounters who come off seeming like the representatives of the truly alien culture. Theroux spends an entire year traversing China and immersing himself in the local culture, and by the end of the book I find myself understanding, or at least tolerating the Chinese more and the Americans less. I have found out during my own travels that the most severe form of culture shock comes from returning to your own country after a long absence.

Jeremy W. Forstadt

I do not travel much (unfortunately), except in my lazy chair, with P. Theroux. I love the way he describes the people he meets, the way he critisizes local authorities etc. He's not an xenophobic, but neverthless, stays American. He travels by train, and describes the scenery, the other travellers, the landscape, the buislings etc.

the author went to China with a rather simple-minded purpose--to prove wrong the "we can always fool a foreigner" saying. Well, he's succeded, although i suspect anyone THAT intent on finding "prove" can succede. This book is the work of a BITTER, self-righteous man who is not only satarical and uncompromising, but appearantly proud of it too. I absolute do not recommend this book.

As a reporter, Paul Theroux is a great novelist. He treats his subjects as though he's reviewing their lives as performances. I've never read such a distant account by someone who spent so much time in a place. There are lots of stories of train meals. Where are the stories of family life, of children, of education, and health care? This is China from the dining car window, which wouldn't be so bad if it didn't go on for 400+ pages.

Maybe he doesn't write those stories because he seems contemptuous of everyone he meets, whether Chinese or not, from his fellow travelers to dinner companions. Perhaps interacting with such persons distracts him from all the magnificent books he's reading on the train (we get to find out about them all, it seems). Hey, Paul, if you wanna read in peace, stay off Chinese trains.

This is also a period piece, which is odd, considering the book is only 11 years old. I grew weary of the post-Cultural Revolution discussions, for example, and the constant references to Mao's thoughts (Hey, I read some of the book--lookit!). With the luddite's love for steam engines (the Chinese stopped building them the year his book was published) and quill pens, Theroux seems unable to imagine a modern China flexing its military muscles and engaged in the World Trade Organization. For all his accounting of Chinese history, he seems only able to grapple with the past two decades with much authority.

This is a highly descriptive and most unhappy account of a long and arduous journey. I can't imagine Theroux enjoyed the work. I can't say I much did, either.

I find Paul Thoreaux to be an excellent writer, even though he seems a little pessimistic sometimes. He has way of looking beyond the glittering surface of things and telling it how he sees it. There is nothing fake about his work. He captures the concept and the depression of the poverty of Warsaw and Moscow wonderfully, and depicts China's issues and complaints wonderfully. He is perfect at seeing through culture and gender to the pain that lives underneath. He is a wonderful, honest writer, and so far I am loving his book. I could almost believe that I had been to some of the places he traveled.

I found the Audio book to be exceptionally well done. Norman Dietz, the reader, is terrific. He "acts" the narratives using his voice, making the 23 hours wonderfully listenable.

Paul Theroux's means and mode of travel, ability to communicate in native languages, description of landscape, and encounters with peoples, police, bureacrats, etc. extremely interesting and educational.
Theroux at one point says an author's greatest accomplishment is tell the story so the reader feels he is there and experiencing what is being described. Theroux acomplishes this beautifully. I see vividly the scenes and feel I know personnally the people he meets.
Terrific book to learn about the countries of Africa, their politics,different cultures between African countries, the institutionalized violence and histories.
His views on the various "charity industries"of Africa is compelling. His view of their self-interest overiding any good that is accomplished by them. In fact they are counter productive and to so some degree responsible for the lack of any real educational, economic or political progress in most African countries.
It is not a "happy" story that will leave readers with an optimistic view of the future for the continent. You will,however, have a feeling for Africa's potential with leadership. Leadership capable of providing education for the masses, developing economic resources for the benefit of their countries rather than the politicians in power at any given time.

Forty years after being a Peace Corps worker in Malawi and a teacher in Uganda, Paul Theroux returns to Africa and finds things changed--for the worse. Now approaching his sixtieth birthday and wanting to escape from cell phones, answering machines, the daily newspaper, and being "put on hold," he is determined to travel from Cairo to Cape Town. He believes that the continent "contain[s] many untold tales and some hope and comedy and sweetness, too," and that there is "more to Africa than misery and terror."

Traveling alone by cattle truck, "chicken bus," bush train, matatu, rental car, ferry, and even dugout canoe, he tries to blend in as much as possible, buying clothing at secondhand stalls in public markets, carrying only one small bag, and avoiding the tourist destinations. He is an observant and insightful writer, and his descriptions of his travails are so vivid the reader can experience them vicariously. His interviews with residents are perceptive and very revealing of the political and social climate of these places, and his character sketches of Sister Alexandra from Ethiopia (a nun who "has loved") and of two charming Ethiopian traders, a father and son, who take Theroux to the Kenyan border, are delightful.

For most of the countries of Africa, however, he has no kind words. Kenya is "one of the most corrupt...countries in Africa," everything in Kampala, Uganda, has changed for the worse, and in Tanzania "there was only decline--simple linear decrepitude, and in some villages collapse." At the U.S. embassy in Malawi, he finds an "overpaid, officious, disingenuous, blame-shifting...embassy hack" and, in pique, he wonders, "Had she, like me, been abused, terrified, stranded, harassed, cheated, bitten, flooded, insulted, exhausted, robbed, browbeaten, poisoned?"

Theroux has become waspish, and it is difficult to "travel with" a man who sees himself as a hero for making the trip at all, especially after he refuses to give a half-eaten apple to a hungry child when she begs for it. He makes snide remarks and demeans other writers. He admires Rimbaud, who lived in Ethiopia in the 1880's, he visits Naguib Mahfouz in Egypt, and he spends his sixtieth birthday with Nadine Gordimer, an old friend. But Hemingway ("bent on proving his manhood"), Isak Dinesen ("a sentimental memoirist"), Kuki Gallman (a "mythomaniac of the present day"), and V.S. Naipaul ("an outsider who feels weak") are abruptly dismissed. When he ultimately refers to his own "safari-as-struggle," it is hard not compare his temporary and entirely voluntary "struggle" to those of the African people he meets along the way. "Being in Africa was like being on a dark star," he says. His book reflects this darkness--and his own. Mary Whipple

This is the unlikely story of a young female Ph. D. who, upon finding that she isn't makeing enough money to live the life she would like to, becomes a high price call girl at night. She takes this step rather matter of factly and there seems to be little or no squeamishness expressed at such a career move. After all, her clients are men of quality - business and government officials who are polite and can afford to pay. Her only complaint has to do with the kind of intercourse many of her clients want (I will leave the specifics to other readers to discover). The complication in the story occurs when a high government official becomes one of her regular clients and they develop a real fondness for one another. Further complications come from a regular Arab customer who intends to use Dr. Slaughter's relationship with the government official as a way of setting up his assassination.

For those who have seen the movie 'Half Moon Street' on which this book is based, the two are quite different. The book is better; the characters are more real and the overall emotional impact of the book is move satisfying.

The postcard images are outstanding: full page, clear views,excellent examples of the genre and rare ones. However, the accompaning one line notes in back of the book are inadequate. These cards appear to be one person's collection and are mostly from French colonies.

"Fong and the Indians" is Paul Theroux's second novel and was written after spending several years of teaching at the University of Kampala in Uganda.

The novel relates the story of the hapless Chinese immigrant Sam Fong and his family to an unnamed African country. Having immigrated before the cultural revolution in China, the Catholic Fong is blissfully unaware of Communism and Chairman Mao's new China. After the de-colonization of his new home-country, Fong, a carpenter by trade, is demoted and in disgust quits his job and opens a grocery store.

Having never run a grocery store and unable to speak any English, Fong is "helped" by a wily Indian named Fakhru. The grocery store does not do well due to civil unrest in the country, but Fong has by necessity become an assiduous shopkeeper and manages to keep himself and his family alive by living extremely frugally.

Upon realizing that Fong is actually managing to save some of his meager profits, Fakhru artfully convinces Fong to buy a huge shipment of canned milk. Fakhru persuades the wretched Fong by telling him that if the milk train from Mombasa were ever to derail, Fong would be a rich man. Foreseeing untold riches, Fong invests his life savings in several crates of canned milk.

With a store filled to the rafters with canned milk, Fong sells not a single can as he waits for the milk train to derail. To add to Fong's woes, civil war erupts and Fong and his family are forced to close the shop. Just as things are at their bleakest, two Americans enter the scene.

The Americans, Bert G. Newt, Jr. and Mel Francey, convinced that Fong is a Communist, try to sell him on the idea of capitalism and free enterprise. Nearly as out of their element in Africa as Fong, they compensate for their lack of diplomatic acumen with patriotic fervor, and wage a splendidly miscalculated campaign to put an end to Fong's nonexistent Communist sympathies. Unfortunately Fong speaks no English, and all communications are relayed to Fong via Fakhru, who has only his own enrichment in mind.

Fong and the Indians is truly a charming tale and depicts Africa, it's cities and inhabitants to a tee. Fong is a lovable non-hero and the novel is a window into a typical African city in the early to late sixties.

If you saw and hated the movie with Sigourney Weaver, you should still give this Theroux story a try. HMS is actually two short and unconnected novellas - the plots and characters aren't related, but they share common themes about the dangers of self-invention. The stories aren't even the same size.

In "Buried Alive", the shorter of the two, a man digs into the shadowy life of his dead twin brother, slowly but surely forming the idea of assuming his identity. The end comes as no surprise, but Theroux deftly crafts the lifetime of failure that underlies the protagonist, a man who finds himself verging into what appears to be a more attractive life than his own.

In "Doctor Slaughter", a brilliant and beautiful analyst of petroleum production supplements her meager income through high-priced prostitution. From the start, it's clear that Loren Slaughter uses sex for mercenary purposes (like paying the plumber to defrost the toilet of her London flat, or to customize a small fur coat), but becoming a call-girl makes her useful to others. If the story doesn't grab you, Paul Theroux's writing style makes it impossible to put HMS down. Spare but perfect prose highlight the façade of strength that Loren uses to make her life bearable - made practically unendurable by miseries of London life. As with the shorter story, Loren's ends in a climax that is understated and hardly a surprise, but one that packs a wallop nonetheless.

In 1980 I proofread a magazine excerpt of a Paul Theroux book. It began with his getting up early to catch a train from Boston to begin a journey to Patagonia. Who cares how early this bloody New Englander had to get up or what he had for breakfast? I'd thought Patagonia was a mythical country. I guarantee you it wasn't in my geography book. Turns out it's part of Argentina. Big deal.

But the guy is a real writer. In The Happy Isles, he recounts the tale of how he brought a folding boat, about the size of a big suitcase, to every Pacific island you've ever dreamed about and paddled around them all. Forget those islands -- Theroux says they are mostly full of lazy, suspicious people who stuff themselves with imported junk food. Some are Christian religious fanatics, some are vicious pagans, and some are both.

The first two chapters are on New Zealand, and I imagine those folks would shoot Theroux on sight if he had the temerity to return. He was not complimentary.

Theroux is not Mr. Sweetness and Light, but that's all the more enjoyable as he demolishes the images of tropical paradises, whether in Meganesia, Melanesia, Polynesia, or Hawaii. Stay home! Stay home, pour a Mai Tai, and enjoy this delightful putdown.