The Tao of Travel: Enlightenments from Lives on the Road (Paperback)

From the publisher who brought you Alain de Botton’s bestselling The Art of Travel (137,000) comes a literary traveller's handbook from one of our finest travel writers. 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 traveller. Part philosophical guide, part miscellany, part reminiscence, The Tao of Travel enumerates 'The Contents of Some Travellers' Bags' and exposes 'Writers Who Wrote About Places They Never Visited'; tracks extreme journeys in 'Travel As An Ordeal' and highlights some of 'Travellers' Favourite Places'. Excerpts from the best of Theroux's own work are interspersed with selections from travellers both familiar and unexpected, including: Vladimir Nabokov; Samuel Johnson; Evelyn Waugh; Susan Sontag; Charles Dickens; Henry David Thoreau; Mark Twain; Bruce Chatwin; Freya Stark; Graham Greene; Eudora Welty; Isak Dinesen; James Baldwin; Anton Chekhov Peter Matthiessen; Ernest Hemingway and more.