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 “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.