The Best American Travel Writing 2001

by Paul Theroux, Jason Wilson

Release Date: 10 October, 2001

Edition: Paperback

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If you like Paul Theroux's books, you'll like this book

I like travel literature, and I've enjoyed Paul Theroux's books, so I thought I'd try this book. I read the 2000 version of Best American Travel literature, which really reflects Bill Bryson's writing style. And true to my expectations, this version reflects Paul Theroux's style. The articles are more political, more edgy, more depressing, just like Theroux. It's superb writing though, while not always light, so you should expect to take on some of the more 'heady' travel topics in this volume. Theroux really has stuck to his own style in choosing the stories that make up this book. A really good set of stories though.

Not romantic, but rivetting

Anyone who's read Paul Theroux's travel books - "The Old Patagonian Express," "The Happy Isles of Oceania" - knows he's not in it for the fun. His selections for the best travel pieces of 2000 (for this 2001 edition), reflect his seriousness of purpose, his sense of place and his eye for quality writing. "It is not about vacations," he states in his introduction, and explains, "travel writing at its best relates a journey of discovery that is frequently risky and sometimes grim and often pure horror, with a happy ending: to hell and back."

This book is not about places you want to go to. It's about the world, much of it remote, in its workaday, sometimes hostile, raiment. Taken from a wide variety of magazines and newspapers, presented in alphabetical order (with contributor notes in the back), these essays consider the reflective traveler's relation to unfamiliar places, people, and events.

There are contemplative journeys: Russell Banks' strange encounter at the top of the Andes; Scott Anderson's brotherly competition for dangerous destinations; Lawrence Millman's lighthearted sojourn on the Mediterranean island of Pantelleria; Janet Malcolm's search for Chekhov in the places he wrote about; Edward Said's grim "Paradise Lost," recalling his idyllic childhood in the Lebanese hills, now buried in rubble.

There are anthropological adventures like Gretel Ehrlich's long dog-sled hunt with the Inuit in Greenland and there are adventures touched with politics and history, like Philip Caputo's travels among the man-eating lions of Kenya, Tim Cahill's trip to Ecuador's erupting volcanoes (and their villages) and David Quammen's winter search for the wolves in post-communist Romania.

Journalistic pieces tell us the things we don't know, the things we should know. Michael Finkel's "Desperate Passage" places him among a leaky boatload of desperate Haitians hoping for America, and Susan Minot relates a tangled, ugly history as she introduces us to children kidnapped by rebels in Uganda. Andrew Cockburn visits the "new" Iran, Patrick Symmes searches out the guerrillas in Columbia. There are portraits of places, politics and loneliness like Peter Hessler's story of the inept burglar on the China/Korea border and Susan Orlean's portrait of Khao San Road in Bangkok.

In a category all its own is Salman Rushdie's eloquent, emotionally nuanced "A Dream of Glorious Return," the story of his first trip back to India since the publication of "The Satanic Verses" twelve years before. His 20-year-old son, Zafar (who has never read his father's books) accompanies him and Rushdie, ebullient with homecoming rapture, attempts to see the country through Zafar's fresh (often appalled) perspective as well as his own. It's a piece full of joy and sadness and political tension, beautifully told.

There is humor in many of these pieces but hilarity is not Theroux's first interest. These essays will appeal to those looking for an armchair view of the world's niches, many of them ugly. Without exception the writing is clear and vivid, and the writer's eye intelligent and unpretentious.