The Tao of Travel: Enlightenments from Lives on the Road
Paul Theroux celebrates fifty years of wandering the globe by collecting the best writing on travel from the books that shaped him, as a reader and a traveler. Part philosophical guide, part miscellany, part reminiscence, The Tao of Travel enumerates €œThe Contents of Some Travelers€ Bags€ and exposes €œWriters Who Wrote about Places They Never Visited€Â; tracks extreme journeys in €œTravel as an Ordeal€ and highlights some of €œTravelers€ Favorite Places.€ Excerpts from the best of Theroux€s own work are interspersed with selections from travelers both familiar and unexpected:Â
Vladimir Nabokov          J.R.R. TolkienÂ
Samuel Johnson              Eudora Welty
Evelyn Waugh                  Isak DinesenÂ
Charles Dickens              James BaldwinÂ
Henry David Thoreau      Pico IyerÂ
Mark Twain                    Anton ChekhovÂ
Bruce Chatwin                 John McPhee
Freya Stark                     Peter MatthiessenÂ
Graham Greene               Ernest Hemingway
 The Tao of Travel is a unique tribute to the pleasures and pains of travel in its golden age.