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Books : Search |
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Ghost Train to the Eastern Star: On the Tracks of the Great Railway Bazaar»rank: 2090by: Paul Theroux
: :Thirty years after the epic journey chronicled in his classic work The Great Railway Bazaar, the world's most acclaimed travel writer re-creates his 25,000-mile journey through eastern Europe, central Asia, the Indian subcontinent, China, Japan, and Siberia.Half a lifetime ago, Paul Theroux virtually invented the modern travel narrative by recounting his grand tour by train through Asia. In the three decades since, the world he recorded in that book has undergone phenomenal change. The Soviet Union has collapsed and China has risen; India booms while Burma smothers under dictatorship; Vietnam flourishes in the aftermath of the havoc America was unleashing on it the last time Theroux passed through. And no one is ... |
Playboy Best of Fiction, v5 (Best of Playboy Fiction)»rank: 5668019by: Paul Theroux, Ursula K. Leguin, Kurt Vonnegut Jr., Andre Dubus, Lawrence Sanders, John Updike
: :Paul Theroux: Dog Days (30 min)It was a time of excessive heat, unwholesome influences – and an overpowering lust for the Chinese servant girl.Theroux is a novelist, short story and travel writer. His more than two dozen books include Riding the Iron Rooster and Mosquito Coast.DOG DAYS, by Paul Theroux, originally appeared in Playboy Magazine (November, 1971) ©1971 Playboy.Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.: Fortitude (30 min)She was a lovely old lady – at least what was left of her – and she had the best set of sweetbreads that money could buy.Vonnegut is the bestselling author of many works, including Slaughterhouse Five, Breakfast of Champions and, most recently, Hocus Pocus.FORTITUDE, by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., ... |
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The Great Railway Bazaar»rank: 9133by: Paul Theroux
: :First published more than thirty years ago, Paul Theroux's strange, unique, and hugely entertaining railway odyssey has become a modern classic of travel literature. Here Theroux recounts his early adventures on an unusual grand continental tour. Asia's fabled trains -- the Orient Express, the Khyber Pass Local, the Frontier Mail, the Golden Arrow to Kuala Lumpur, the Mandalay Express, the Trans-Siberian Express -- are the stars of a journey that takes him on a loop eastbound from London's Victoria Station to Tokyo Central, then back from Japan on the Trans-Siberian. Brimming with Theroux's signature humor and wry observations, this engrossing chronicle is essential reading for both the ardent adventurer and the armchair ... |
Dark Star Safari: Overland from Cairo to Capetown»rank: 10165by: Paul Theroux
: :In the travel-writing tradition that made Paul Theroux's reputation, Dark Star Safari is a rich and insightful book whose itinerary is Africa, from Cairo to Cape Town: down the Nile, through Sudan and Ethiopia, to Kenya, Uganda, and ultimately to the tip of South Africa. Going by train, dugout canoe, 'chicken bus,' and cattle truck, Theroux passes through some of the most beautiful — and often life-threatening — landscapes on earth. This is travel as discovery and also, in part, a sentimental journey. Almost forty years ago, Theroux first went to Africa as a teacher in the Malawi bush. Now he stops at his old school, sees former students, revisits his African ... |
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The Old Patagonian Express: By Train Through the Americas»rank: 21136by: Paul Theroux
: :Starting with a rush-hour subway ride to South Station in Boston to catch the Lake Shore Limited to Chicago, Theroux winds up on the poky, wandering Old Patagonian Express steam engine, which comes to a halt in a desolate land of cracked hills and thorn bushes. But with Theroux the view along the way is what matters: the monologuing Mr. Thornberry in Costa Rica, the bogus priest of Cali, and the blind Jorge Luis Borges, who delights in having Theroux read Robert Louis Stevenson to him. |
The Last Place on Earth (Modern Library Exploration)»rank: 82877by: Roland Huntford
: :At the beginning of the twentieth century, the South Pole was the most coveted prize in the fiercely nationalistic modern age of exploration. In the brilliant dual biography, the award-winning writer Roland Huntford re-examines every detail of the great race to the South Pole between Britain's Robert Scott and Norway's Roald Amundsen. Scott, who dies along with four of his men only eleven miles from his next cache of supplies, became Britain's beloved failure, while Amundsen, who not only beat Scott to the Pole but returned alive, was largely forgotten. This account of their race is a gripping, highly readable history that captures the driving ambitions of the era and the complex, ... |
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The Mosquito Coast»rank: 218547by: Paul Theroux
: :In a breathtaking adventure story, the paranoid and brilliant inventor Allie Fox takes his family to live in the Honduran jungle, determined to build a civilization better than the one they've left. Fleeing from an America he sees as mired in materialism and conformity, he hopes to rediscover a purer life. But his utopian experiment takes a dark turn when his obsessions lead the family toward unimaginable danger. |
The Elephanta Suite»rank: 27912by: Paul Theroux
: :This startling, far-reaching book captures the tumult, ambition, hardship, and serenity that mark today's India. Theroux's Westerners risk venturing far beyond the subcontinent's well-worn paths to discover woe or truth or peace. A middle-aged couple on vacation veers heedlessly from idyll to chaos. A buttoned-up Boston lawyer finds succor in Mumbai's reeking slums. And a young woman befriends an elephant in Bangalore. We also meet Indian characters as singular as they are reflective of the country's subtle ironies: an executive who yearns to become a holy beggar, an earnest striver whose personality is rewired by acquiring an American accent, a miracle-working guru, and others. As ever, Theroux's portraits of people and places ... |
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The Happy Isles of Oceania: Paddling the Pacific»rank: 57626by: Paul Theroux
: :In one of his most exotic and breathtaking journeys, the intrepid traveler Paul Theroux ventures to the South Pacific, exploring fifty-one islands by collapsible kayak. Beginning in New Zealand's rain forests and ultimately coming to shore thousands of miles away in Hawaii, Theroux paddles alone over isolated atolls, through dirty harbors and shark-filled waters, and along treacherous coastlines. This exhilarating tropical epic is full of disarming observations and high adventure. |
The Worst Journey in the World : Antarctic 1910-1913 (Explorers Club Classic)»rank: 2813116by: Apsley Cherry-Garrard, Paul Theroux
: :Cherry-Gerrards classic story of bravery and fortitude, first published in 1922 tells us of Scotts last expedition to the Antarctic from its departure from England in 1910 to its arrival in New Zealand in 1913. It is one of the most famous and tragic in the annals of exploration. Review:As Apsley Cherry-Garrard states in his introduction to the harrowing story of the Scott expedition to the South Pole, 'Polar Exploration is at once the cleanest and most isolated way of having a bad time which has been devised.' Cherry-Garrard's The Worst Journey in the World is a gripping account of an expedition gone disastrously wrong. The youngest member of Scott's team, ... |