Paul Theroux

I grew up with a wanderlust. A young boy. A voracious reader even then who hailed from a small mining village in the West Riding of Yorkshire. Trains were a joy and an adventure from my youngest days clipping across country to the seedy joys of an often overcast Blackpool or Lytham in July, with a bag of sweets in one hand and a Famous Five or Doctor Who book in the other. My Grandma and brother either side. I have Asia in my soul after thirty years imbibing its tastes and smells and sights show more and sounds.

Theroux's book - by train from London across Asia - is an obvious delight for me. His observations, encounters and opinions funny, descriptively vivid and oftentimes profound.

I read this many moons ago and I don't remember enjoying it quite nearly as much as this time.

Also one of my favourite ever book covers. show less

Another brilliant travelogue by Mr Theroux, as he journeys through South Africa (revisiting a few places from earlier 'Dark Star Safari') , Namibia, touches on Botswana's Okavango Delta and on to Angola. The author was 70 when he wrote this and you feel throughout the much older self than in previous works.
I think I so like his writing because it's so balanced. He writes with compassion on the horrors of a shanty town, but isn't affraid to ask the locals why- with unemployment rife- they're show more unable to pick up the appalling litter. There are lovely bits...but a lot of hostility, mess and chaos. Although often on rough local buses and mixing with the dispossessed, he meets up too with teachers...and with the super wealthy in a stay at a luxury elephant ranch (surprisingly this was one of the hardest hitting chapters in the book.)
Mr Theroux abandons his longer planned itinerary in Angola- a place wrecked not by poverty but by an entirely corrupt government, keeping the huge oil revenue and leaving the people to stagnate. I was left with a definite sense of Angola- its wildlife almost entirely gone, after years of war - as an entirely ghastly place with no redeeming features."Why would I wish to travel through blight and disorder...the squalid slum in Luanda is ... identical to the squalid slum in Cape Town and Jo'burg and Nairobi. ...We have bestowed on Africa just enough of the disposable junk of the modern world to create in African cities a junkyard replica of the West."
Highly readable, intelligent and informative. show less

Paul Theroux gives his reason for wanting to take an overland journey through Africa in the beginning of the book, “Being available at any time in the total accessible world seemed to me pure horror. It made me want to find a place that was not accessible at all: no phones, no fax machines, not even mail delivery, the wonderful old world of being out of touch. In other words, gone away….The greatest justification for travel is not self-improvement but rather performing a vanishing act, show more disappearing without a trace. As Huck put it, lighting out for the territory.” He describes Africa as one of the last places on earth one can vanish into. Theroux had been a Peace Corps volunteer and teacher in Malawi and Uganda thirty years prior—he wanted to see how it had held up.

One of the reasons I like Theroux’s books so much is because I would never take the risks and journeys he does. But I like experiencing them through him. He reads during his trips—often books and long-dead authors connected with traveling through the region—if it be Mark Twain or Rousseau. And he usually has time to stop in and chat a bit with the regional celebrity author. I keep my Amazon wishlist close by to add to as I read. Theroux is no Rick Steves. He doesn’t travel in luxury nor or his writings to encourage you to follow in his steps. His trips are usually zen banality traveling on hot smelly buses or trains that always break down. These moments are punctuated with things like being shot at or illness. A frequent theme through the book is an African warning him away from the place he is about to go because, “bad people are there.”

He is not happy with what he finds on his journey. He was criticized after the book’s release for his contempt of Aid and Aid Workers and missionaries in Africa. Paul is a curmudgeon. But it is the chapters that he writes about his visits to the schools he taught in and you can feel his disappointment at the futility he sees. He visits the graves of the couple who founded the school and describes how their unkemptness would have disappointed the old orderly couple and so he weeds their grave himself. He also visits the school itself—aid promised was stolen, and the books had all been stolen and the school was falling down. He was disappointed to find that many of his fellow African teachers had sent their children elsewhere for education, but in some cases had encouraged their children to not come back but to stay in other countries.

If you are a real-life or an arm-chair adventurer and you love good travel writing and reading about literature then check out Theroux. show less

Despite this being a book read in honor of Father's Day, Charlie Fox's dad isn't the ideal father figure. He could fit into the role of Jack Torrance in Stephen King's The Shining. Allie Fox, from the town of Hadley in Massachusetts, doesn't trust the traditional school system, doesn't trust the government, doesn't trust his neighbors. He believes he can teach his children (Charlie, Jerry and the twins, Clover and April) all they need to know. He doesn't suffer fools and constantly tests his show more children's courage, especially eldest son Charlie's. He is in constant competition with other men ("How many push ups can you do?"); he is proud, defiant, and must not, absolutely cannot, be embarrassed in front of his family. Fed up with his own country, Papa Fox is easily swayed by Honduran migrant workers to pack up his family and move to the Mosquito Coast. Once there, Theroux threads a growing sense of unease throughout the pages. The first whiff of danger comes with Father jokes about throwing Mr. Haddy overboard and it is possible to believe he is mad enough to have done it. Like Kings's Jack Torrance, Allie Fox displays an escalating sense of craziness as time goes on. Paranoia grows like mold in the jungles of Honduras. It goes without saying that things don't end well for the Fox family; or maybe they do if you like endings like The Shining. show less