The Tao of Travel: Enlightenments from Lives on the Road

Summary

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 “The Contents of Some Travelers’ Bags” and exposes “Writers Who Wrote about Places They Never Visited”; tracks extreme journeys in “Travel as an Ordeal” and highlights some of “Travelers’ Favorite Places.” Excerpts from the best of Theroux’s own work are interspersed with selections from travelers both familiar and unexpected: 

Vladimir Nabokov           J.R.R. Tolkien 
Samuel Johnson               Eudora Welty
Evelyn Waugh                  Isak Dinesen 
Charles Dickens               James Baldwin 
Henry David Thoreau       Pico Iyer 
Mark Twain                     Anton Chekhov 
Bruce Chatwin                  John McPhee
Freya Stark                      Peter Matthiessen 
Graham Greene                Ernest Hemingway

 The Tao of Travel is a unique tribute to the pleasures and pains of travel in its golden age.