Download or read book Ghost Train to the Eastern Star written by Paul Theroux and published by Emblem Editions. This book was released on 2009-08-25 with total page 513 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: National Bestseller In Ghost Train to the Eastern Star, Theroux recreates an epic journey he took thirty years ago, a giant loop by train (mostly) through Eastern Europe, Turkey, the Caucasus, Central Asia, the Indian Subcontinent, China, Japan, and Siberia. In short, he traverses all of Asia top to bottom, and end to end. In the three decades since he first travelled this route, Asia has undergone phenomenal change. The Soviet Union has collapsed, China has risen, India booms, Burma slowly smothers, and Vietnam prospers despite the havoc unleashed upon it the last time Theroux passed through. He witnesses all this and more in a 25,000 mile journey, travelling as the locals do, by train, car, bus, and foot. His odyssey takes him from Eastern Europe, still hungover from Communism, through tense but thriving Turkey, into the Caucasus, where Georgia limps back toward feudalism while its neighbour Azerbaijan revels in oil-driven capitalism. As he penetrates deeper into Asia’s heart, his encounters take on an otherworldly cast. The two chapters that follow show us Turkmenistan, a profoundly isolated society at the mercy of an almost comically egotistical dictator, and Uzbekistan, a ruthless authoritarian state. From there, he retraces his steps through India, Mayanmar, China, and Japan, providing his penetrating observations on the changes these countries have undergone. Brilliant, caustic, and totally addictive, Ghost Train to the Eastern Star is Theroux at his very best.
Download or read book The Great Railway Bazaar written by Paul Theroux and published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. This book was released on 2006-06-01 with total page 406 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The acclaimed author recounts his epic journey across Europe and Asia in this international bestselling classic of travel literature: “Compulsive reading” (Graham Greene). In 1973, Paul Theroux embarked on a four-month journey by train from the United Kingdom through Europe, the Middle East, and Southeast Asia. In The Great Railway Bazaar, he records in vivid detail and penetrating insight the many fascinating incidents, adventures, and encounters of his grand, intercontinental 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 Theroux 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 traveler.
Download or read book Sunrise with Seamonsters written by Paul Theroux and published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. This book was released on 1986 with total page 388 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: " ... Collection of decidedly opinionated articles, essays, and ruminations, spanning two decades ..."--Page 4 of cover
Download or read book Riding the Iron Rooster written by Paul Theroux and published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. This book was released on 2006-12-08 with total page 533 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The acclaimed travel writer chronicles a year of train travel across China in a revealing travelogue that “gives the reader much to relish and think about” (Publishers Weekly). The author of the train travel classics The Great Railway Bazaar and The Old Patagonian Express, takes to the rails once again in this account of his epic journey through China. The always irascible, infectiously curious author “is in top form as he describes the barren deserts of Mongolia and Xinjiang, the ice forests of Manchuria and the dry hills of Tibet. He captures their otherworldly, haunting appearances perfectly. He is also right on target when he talks about the ugliness of China's poorly planned, hastily built cities” (Mark Salzman, The New York Times). Theroux hops aboard a train as part of a tour group in London and sets out for China's border. He then spends a year traversing the country, where he pieces together a fascinating snapshot of a unique moment in history. From sweeping and desolate natural landscapes to the dense metropolises of Shanghai, Beijing, and Canton, Theroux offers an unforgettable portrait of a magnificent land and an extraordinary people.
Download or read book The Last Train to Zona Verde written by Paul Theroux and published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. This book was released on 2013 with total page 373 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The world's most acclaimed travel writer journeys through western Africa from Cape Town to the Congo.
Download or read book Ghost Train to the Eastern Star written by Paul Theroux and published by . This book was released on 2007 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Deep South written by Paul Theroux and published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. This book was released on 2015 with total page 485 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Paul Theroux has spent fifty years crossing the globe, adventuring in the exotic, seeking the rich history and folklore of the far away. Now, for the first time, in his tenth travel book, Theroux explores a piece of America--the Deep South. He finds there a paradoxical place, full of incomparable music, unparalleled cuisine, and yet also some of the nation's worst schools, housing, and unemployment rates. It's these parts of the South, so often ignored, that have caught Theroux's keen traveler's eye."--
Download or read book Fresh Air Fiend written by Paul Theroux and published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. This book was released on 2001 with total page 486 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Whether it is trekking through the icy Maine woods, or journeying to a remote island in the South Pacific where the first atomic bombs were detonated, Theroux serves as both camera and the eye. This collection of essays and articles is the ultimate good read for anyone fascinated by travel.
Download or read book The Happy Isles of Oceania written by Paul Theroux and published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. This book was released on 2006-12-08 with total page 731 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The author of The Great Railway Bazaar explores the South Pacific by kayak: “This exhilarating epic ranks with [his] best travel books” (Publishers Weekly). In one of his most exotic and adventuresome journeys, travel writer Paul Theroux embarks on an eighteen-month tour of 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. Along the way, Theroux meets the king of Tonga, encounters street gangs in Auckland, and investigates a cargo cult in Vanuatu. From Australia to Tahiti, Fiji, Easter Island, and beyond, this exhilarating tropical epic is full of disarming observations and high adventure.
Download or read book The Old Patagonian Express written by Paul Theroux and published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. This book was released on 2014-11-18 with total page 506 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The acclaimed travel writer journeys by train across the Americas from Boston to Patagonia in this international bestselling travel memoir. Starting with a rush-hour subway ride to South Station in Boston to catch the Lake Shore Limited to Chicago, Paul Theroux takes a grand railway adventure first across the United States and then south through Mexico, Central America, and across the Andes until he winds up on the meandering Old Patagonian Express steam engine. His epic commute finally comes to a halt in a desolate land of cracked hills and thorn bushes that reaches toward Antarctica. Along the way, Theroux demonstrates how train travel can reveal “"the social miseries and scenic splendors” of a continent. And through his perceptive prose we learn that what matters most are the people he meets along the way, including 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.
Download or read book Summary of Paul Theroux s Ghost Train to the Eastern Star written by Milkyway Media and published by Milkyway Media. This book was released on 2024-06-26 with total page 56 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Get the Summary of Paul Theroux's Ghost Train to the Eastern Star in 20 minutes. Please note: This is a summary & not the original book. "Ghost Train to the Eastern Star" by Paul Theroux is a reflective travel narrative that revisits the author's earlier journey from London to Asia. Theroux critiques the romanticism of travel, highlighting its voyeuristic and self-indulgent nature. The journey begins in London, with a Eurostar trip to Paris, and continues through Europe, including Vienna, Budapest, and Istanbul...
Download or read book Woolf in Ceylon written by Christopher Ondaatje and published by . This book was released on 2006 with total page 328 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Leonard Woolf was born in London in 1880 and spent five years at Trinity College, Cambridge where he began lasting friendships with men such as Lytton Strachey, E. M. Forster and John Maynard Keynes. In 1904 Woolf applied to join the home civil service but failed the exam. Instead, he was sent to Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) as a cadet in the Ceylon civil service, joining the small group of white administrators who ruled the colony. He remained there for nearly seven years. In Woolf in Ceylon Christopher Ondaatje, who was himself born and brought up on the island, follows in the footsteps of Woolf. Drawing on his personal experience of Ceylon and empire, he compares the way of life during imperial days with that of the post-colonial era. We learn as much about the country, its people and their transformation of the country during the past century as we do about the man who used his colonial career to become one of the leading English men of letters of the twentieth century. Ondaatje s sensitive descriptions, illustrated with period and modern photographs, tell the compelling story of Woolf s sojourn in Ceylon and his developing disillusionment with the British colonial system. The result is a unique evocation of both a vanished imperial world and a colonial servant s enduring legacy in the contemporary culture of an enchanted but troubled island.
Download or read book On the Plain of Snakes written by Paul Theroux and published by Eamon Dolan Books. This book was released on 2019 with total page 459 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Legendary travel writer Paul Theroux drives the entire length of the US-Mexico border, then goes deep into the hinterland, on the back roads of Chiapas and Oaxaca, to uncover the rich, layered world behind today's brutal headlines. Paul Theroux has spent his life crisscrossing the globe in search of the histories and peoples that give life to the places they call home. Now, as immigration debates boil around the world, Theroux has set out to explore a country key to understanding our current discourse: Mexico. Just south of the Arizona border, in the desert region of Sonora, he finds a place brimming with vitality, yet visibly marked by both the US Border Patrol looming to the north and mounting discord from within. With the same humanizing sensibility he employed in Deep South, Theroux stops to talk with residents, visits Zapotec mill workers in the highlands, and attends a Zapatista party meeting, communing with people of all stripes who remain south of the border even as their families brave the journey north. From the writer praised for his "curiosity and affection for humanity in all its forms" (New York Times Book Review), On the Plain of Snakes is an exploration of a region in conflict.
Download or read book To the Ends of the Earth written by Paul Theroux and published by Ivy Books. This book was released on 2011-04-27 with total page 384 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “There are those who think that Paul Theroux is the finest travel writer working in English. This collection can only enhance that reputation.”—The New York Times Book Review Author and travel writer Paul Theroux does what no one else can: he travels to the isolated, unusual, and fascinating spots of the world, and creates an elegy to them that makes readers feel they are traveling with him. Evocative, breathtaking, intriguing, here is the armchair traveler's guide to the sites of the world he makes us feel we know. Praise for To the Ends of the Earth “Reads like a wonderful novel.”—The Pittsburgh Press “Powerful . . . This compendium unequivocally offers insight into the mind of a foremost American fiction writer who became an accidental tourist.”—The Christian Science Monitor “Theroux is a wonderful traveling companion. . . . To the Ends of the Earth combines the best of his travel writing. . . . With him the reader shares a conversation with a sultan on a polo ground in Malaysia; hears people ‘mourn with firecrackers, scattering cherrybombs on the tombstone’ in a Chinese cemetery in Singapore; feels overdressed around nudists in Corsica; sees sandbagged houses and bombcraters left in Vietnam on a cold December day in 1973.”—The Virginian-Pilot and The Ledger-Star “Travel writing at its best . . . As you travel voyeuristically with Theroux, across the vast wastelands of interior China, the convoluted cultures of Latin America or campy seacoast towns of England, you're struck with his slightly jaundiced eye for the overlooked but telling detail, his skeptic's ear for the offhand but important comment.”—The Houston Post
Download or read book The Kingdom by the Sea written by Paul Theroux and published by HMH. This book was released on 2006-06-01 with total page 371 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This “interesting, insightful book” by the author of Deep South reveals “a side of Britain few visitors see” (The New York Times Book Review). After eleven years as an American living in London, the renowned travel writer Paul Theroux set out to travel clockwise around the coast of Great Britain to find out what the British were really like. The result is this perceptive, hilarious record of the journey. Whether in Cornwall or Wales, Ulster or Scotland, the people he encountered along the way revealed far more of themselves than they perhaps intended to display to a stranger. Theroux captured their rich and varied conversational commentary with caustic wit and penetrating insight. “A sharp and funny descriptive writer . . . Theroux is a good companion.” —The Times (London)
Download or read book Albion s Seed written by David Hackett Fischer and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 1991-03-14 with total page 981 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This fascinating book is the first volume in a projected cultural history of the United States, from the earliest English settlements to our own time. It is a history of American folkways as they have changed through time, and it argues a thesis about the importance for the United States of having been British in its cultural origins. While most people in the United States today have no British ancestors, they have assimilated regional cultures which were created by British colonists, even while preserving ethnic identities at the same time. In this sense, nearly all Americans are "Albion's Seed," no matter what their ethnicity may be. The concluding section of this remarkable book explores the ways that regional cultures have continued to dominate national politics from 1789 to 1988, and still help to shape attitudes toward education, government, gender, and violence, on which differences between American regions are greater than between European nations.
Download or read book The Lower River written by Paul Theroux and published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. This book was released on 2012 with total page 361 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A taut, tense, darkly suspenseful novel about a man who flees to Africa after his marriage falls apart, only to be caught up in a precarious situation in a seemingly benign village.
