No comments about LUXE Berlin (LUXE City Guides).

No comments about Kerala: A Magical Odyssey (Travel).

5 comments about The Great Railway Bazaar: By Train Through Asia.

1. I've read a bunch of his travel books now. I always find them fun to read. This one, however, I found a little more difficult than the others. To me often it was like a crazy quilt of scenes and I felt overwhelmed at times. I enjoyed learning about the Sikhs and northern India in general. But what do I know about the Biharis vs. the Bengalis? I formed pictures, but felt I didn't know what it was all about. Though after reading what he writes about India, I never want to go there. But then I found it so interesting to read about how the people of Japan are so entertained by violent sex with blood and murder. That young girl with the comic book depicting all that violence! Why is that so entertaining to them? Well, Americans like that stuff too. But I'd rather read about what it is really like than about some phony everyone is so loving to everyone else sort of thing. And I will never forget the one-legged man, hopping ahead so fast that Paul couldn't catch up with him. All in all, I am immensely grateful to Paul Theroux for his showing me all these things around the world while I am safely ensconced in my comforable easy chair at home.



2. Note: I made some immature Mormon angry because of my negative reviews of books that attempted to prove the Book of Mormon, and that person has been slamming my reviews almost as fast as they are posted.
   
   So, your "helpful" votes are appreciated. Thanks, and note that a short review is not necessarily a bad review if it leads you to a great book.
   
   If you always dreamed of traveling, then do it the easy way by reading one of Paul Theroux's accounts of his travels. They are funny and insightful and grand adventures. Check out these lines:
   
   "The sad engineer would never go back to England; he would become one of these elderly expatriates who hide out in remote countries, with odd sympathies, a weakness for the local religion, an unreasonable anger, and the kind of total recall that drives curious strangers away."
   
   Speaking of young foreign travelers, Theroux says:
   
   "Occasionally, I saw an amorous pair leave their compartment hand in hand to go copulate in the toilet.
   Most were on their way to India and Nepal, because
   `the wildest dreams of Kew are the facts of Khatmandhu
   And the crimes of Clapham chaste in Martaban.'
   But the majority of them, going for the first time, had that look of frozen apprehension that is the mask of the face of an excapee."
   
   Theroux has a great quote in the beginning of the first chapter--"The journey is the goal."



3. ... and this book is indeed an old friend, for it is the work that introduced me - and many others - to Paul Theroux. It was this book that introduced me to Theroux's charming crankiness, his wickedly astute ability to size up a human interaction and make the most of it - almost like a young boy who starts to craft a "whopper" - but most of all, his uncanny talent for observing a scene for nary a moment and offering up visualization that stays in the mind's eye for ages.
   
   Here is Theroux's oft-quoted take on pulling into one of Europe's crown jewels: "Venice, like a drawing room in a gas station, is approached through a vast apron of infertile industrial flatlands, criss-crossed with black sewer troughs and stinking of oil, the gigantic sinks and stoves of refineries and factories, all intimidating the delicate dwarfed city beyond."
   
   But there is more, just as artful, sometimes better:
   
   "...modernization stopped in Turkey with the death of Ataturk, at five minutes past nine on November 10, 1938. As if to demonstrate this, the room in which he died is as he left it, and all the clocks in the palace show the time as 9:05. This seemed to explain why the Turks typically dress the way people did in 1938, in hairy brown sweaters and argyle socks, in baggy pinstriped pants and blue serge suits with padded shoulders, flapping winglike lapels and a three-pointed hanky in the breast pocket. Their hair is wavy with brilliantine and their mustaches are waxed..."
   
   Or this: "Laos, a river bank, had been overrun and ransacked; it was one of America's expensive practical jokes, a motiveless place where nothing was made, everything imported; a kingdom with baffling pretensions to Frenchness... the more I thought of it, the more it seemed like a lower form of life, like the cross-eyed planarian or squashy amoeba, the sort of creature that can't even die when it is cut to ribbons."
   
   Or: "The mountains had begun to rise, acquiring the shape of ampitheaters with a prospect of the China Sea; eerie and bare and blue, their summits smothered in mist, they trailed smoke from slash-and-burn fires... Now it was sunny and warm: the Vietnamese climbed up to the roofs of the coaches and sat with their legs hanging past the eaves. We were close enough to the beach to hear the pounding surf, and ahead in the curving inlets that doubled up the train, fishing smacks and canoes rode the frothy breakers to the shore, where men in parasol hats spun circular webbed nets over the crayfish."
   
   "Railway Bazaar" has been derided by some for offering only a fleeting glimpse of various cultures from a train window and a quick layover; truth be told, that is what foreign travel consists of even for the most intrepid traveler who is not an anthropologist or social scientist. Theroux does a perfectly splendid job painting a portrait of a war-ravaged Vietnam where GIs and the locals have come to somewhat cynical terms with the denouement, and his vivid and disquieting depiction of the infusion of sexual violence into mainstream entertainment (theater and even comic books) in Japan is among the best I have read about this dark underside of that culture.
   
   And then there are the characters of his passing parade, the bit real-life players that Theroux shapes into larger-than-life caricatures. They are at turns annoying, stealthy, invasive, pedantic, morose and beatific, and Theroux breathes life into them - each a literary joy in his or her own way.
   
   Theroux has a wonderful knack for taking the last paragraph of his creations (many, at least) and crystallizing the mood of that work within a final sentence or two (think "Saint Jack" and "My Secret History"). He does that in "Railway Bazaar" and when the literary train pulls into the station, you want to step off quickly, grab a refreshment, then reboard for another ride.
   
   Old Friends like this do need revisiting every so often.



4. It hardly needs repeating that Paul Theroux is an exceptionally gifted writer. Moreover, this is a very skilfully written story, full of original and acute perceptions put across with wit and point. Theroux recounts a series of train journeys, interspersed with boat trips or aeroplane links where the rail option is not available, as for instance when making a sea crossing or in railless Afghanistan. In the course of this journey he has a number of lecturing engagements, presumably arranged in advance, for which I assume (although he does not say so) that he received a fee. I assume also that what took him away from his home and family for so many long months was not just the enjoyment of rail travel that he owns up to, but financial recompense for the book that he intended to publish as a record of his trip.
   
   Earning an honest living by writing, and by travel writing in particular, is a worthy and honourable pursuit. However when the people represented in the story are real people, and the incidents are true occurrences, and the statements recorded are what people really said, there are to my way of thinking certain standards of taste and propriety that should be carefully adhered to. Personal records of travel and encounters along the way are presented impeccably in, say, Germaine Greer's `Daddy We Hardly Knew You' or in Peter Hessler's River Town and Oracle Bones. In these narratives the authors have reasons for being where they are and for meeting who they meet. These are accounts of research, investigation and exploration from which the books are a spin-off. They have not just taken a trip with a view to parading whoever they might happen to meet before the public at large, which is really what Theroux is doing here. Was the permission of Mr Duffill or Mr Molesworth sought before their statements and actions were made public? I doubt it somehow, but my idea of propriety doesn't even necessarily require that. The parties reported sympathetically by Dr Greer obviously knew what she was doing, but the personae she disliked would not have been consulted about what she intended to say about that them, and that is fine by me. What I am not happy about is going out on a fishing trip and subsequently dangling the fish on a line to be gawped at or derided. Some instances are worse than others. It is not particularly offensive to pillory the downmarket press of any country, such as the Indian weekly `Blitz' which informed him regarding some rowdy individual that `He was high and headstrong...Hurled abuse at some and then fisted a guest', in which the last verb is not used in a more recent sense but means `punched'. I also can't deny that I was amused (rather guiltily) at the clever representation of his Japanese host's offer to show him the local Tiergarten `You want to see tzu?' `What kind of tzu?' `Wid enemas'. Very smart, very clever, but coming from someone who spoke no Japanese more than a little patronising and de haut en bas.
   
   I think it is perhaps the chapter on Japan that brings out in particular the slight sense of distaste I feel for this book. Theroux recounts at some length and with some particularity erotic shows and publications patronised by placid-seeming middle-class Japanese. I confess I find the shows as he describes them somewhat disgusting, but in a rather detached way. What revolts me more acutely is the spectacle of the audiences themselves, and that brings to the fore in my mind the nature of Theroux's own narration. What exactly is he doing there in the first place? He is another audience on the next tier. Does he have some mission to tell the world about all this? Is he engaged in academic research? None of that, and he does at least show awareness of the issue, admitting that he is a bit of a drone amusing himself idly and in the process making rather free with other people's privacy for the entertainment of a paying public.
   
   All that said, the book still has plenty to recommend it. I felt that the later chapters are better than the earlier, which have too much sense about them of `oh look at these people doing these things' and `this guy said this three-quarter's of a page worth to me'. There was a sharp improvement starting with the chapter on Singapore, where Theroux's trenchant comments seem to me to be not only valid in themselves but also to satisfy one of my own requirements from a book of this kind by offering analysis and generalisation rather than just random detail. Also, the book was written in the early 1970's, and so is a reminder of an epoch. This was pre-junta Burmah, for instance. It was the time of the cold war. South Africa was still under apartheid although the availability of the industrial capacity of the Japanese obtained for them the status of `white' from Mr Botha or whoever was in charge in South Africa at the time in question. Above all, it was the time of the war in Vietnam, and the vignettes of that ravaged nation as recounted by so talented and independent a storyteller made a vivid impression on one reader at least.
   
   At one point Theroux comments that travel narratives turn into autobiography. The books I have instanced by Greer and Hessler are certainly autobiography and rightly so. I only wish this book had practised what it preaches. Theroux gives away comparatively little about himself apart from his participation in a few dialogues, the purpose of which is largely to pillory his interlocutors, and I particularly miss precisely this sense of personal development which he himself says one should expect.
   
   There is next to nothing for railway geeks, but if I remember one thing above all from the book, it is the tantalising semi-description of the viaduct at Gokteik in Burmah.



5. I enjoyed this book for its wonderful sensuosity, but found the author's superior and condescending tone frustrating. I found myself wondering why on Earth he took the trip if he wasn't going to at least try to appreciate the people and cultures he visited? Still, he took me on a journey I'll probably make myself and, while Theroux may not have relished the adventure, I did.

No comments about Taj Mahal (Wonders of the World).

2 comments about Asia's Legendary Hotels: The Romance of Travel.

1. Any art library strong in commercial architecture and design needs ASIA'S LEGENDARY HOTELS, a focus on the histories and presentations of some of Asia's most famous hotels, from Raffles in Singapore to the Ananda in the Himalayas. From the building of the structures to the famous people who occupied the buildings over the decades, ASIA'S LEGENDARY HOTELS also makes a fine coffee table addition for any who enjoy travel, and may even be considered for public libraries strong in travel pieces mixed with visual displays of structures.



2. Having been interested in tracking down the remaining stamp of the Western colonialism on present-day Asia for close to a decade, I ordered this book immediately after I came across it in a magazine.
   
   The accomodation, the theme of this book, is absolutely one of the few ways left for those who are interested to savour the good old and short-lasting colonial era on their own today.
   
   Unlike South Korea which has struggled, since its depature from the Japanese rule, to stamp out the Japanese influence both materially and mentally, most of the Asian countries have retained the Western colonial stamp and have learned to utilise it as one feature of tourism.
   
   This book covers most of the internationally- famed hotels in both South and South-East Asia dating back to the colonial era.
   
   Every page is beautifully coloured looking like they have been freshly and directly from the authors' camera.
   
   Each hotel's visual introduction is accompanied by a detailed commentary on the history of the hotels.
   
   Hotels featured here range from Peninsula in Hong Kong, the Strand in Burma to top-tier hotels in both Vietnam and Cambodia.
   
   My conclusion is this is not merely a picture guide of old hotels but a highly detailed, academic and entertaining encyclopaedia of colonial hotels with a cornucopia of tips on travelling.
   
   I highly recommend this book for the above reasons, but not 5-star evaluation due to the book's rather bulky size and heavy weight(If the book were much more compact it would be a perfect addtion to your list of things to take with you on your trip.

1 comments about Lonely Planet New Caledonia.

1. This book is the best I have found about New Caledonia. It is so hard for Americans to find good accurate info on New Caledonia but this book does it all. I knew more about some places than many of the locals. It helped me understand where I was going and helped me better integrate into the society there. Wonderful book. I am a lonely planet person now. :-)

1 comments about Wallpaper City Guide: Kyoto (Wallpaper City Guides) (Wallpaper City Guides (Phaidon Press)).

1. I purchased this at the last minute due to the Loney Planet Kyoto guide was changing editions & I couldn't get a copy.
   
   This book did provide some interesting places to go if you are into mostly modern architecture, and it did have some great pictures. Otherwise it was a waste if you wanted more general information. It's written in a "You can only hope to be as cool as us in finding these spots" tone and the recommendations on hotels & dining were all on the uber-tendy side.
   
   The map included in the book was very poor, and none of the sites mentioned in the book were called out on the map (due to the lack of detail) And if you have ever had to deal with addresses in Japan, they are very complex- that's why GPS units are such a big seller there, so it made it very difficult to use.
   
   Plus there appeared to be no flow or grouping to the locations, so if you tried to track things down on the fly, you were going back & forth across the town. After a while I gave up on the book & used a great free map the hotel gave me that was published by the Kyoto City Tourist Association. You can also get a copy of it on the second floor of the JR station at their info center.
   
   Use this book only as a supplement to a better book to find interesting architectural sites.

No comments about Moon Thailand (Moon Handbooks).

1 comments about Travelers' Tales China: True Stories (Travelers' Tales Guides).

1. What is China? Reduced to facts and figures, China is amazing and overwhelming. 1.3 billion people live within its borders. Almost 4 million square miles in area. A history stretching back countless millennia. A modern history filled with catchphrases and people with instant recognition: Mao, Tiananmen, Cultural Revolution, Deng Xiaoping. Its economic and political system defy conventional analysis--a totalitarian, self-proclaimed Communist state increasingly open to market capitalism. Hundreds, perhaps even thousands, of books have been written on China ... travelogues, fiction and non-fiction about its history, its culture both modern and ancient. Yet, despite all the numbers and facts, the "real" China seems quite distant. The question remains: What is China?
   
   Travelers' Tales China takes a different approach. Rather than tackling China at the macro-level (an impossible task), it attempts to portray China through a mosaic of stories, some quite mundane, some quite profound; all wonderfully written and vivid in their description and imagery. The writers' perspectives are ideal for the task: as travelers they are confronted by the perpetual travelers' paradox. As the outsider, they are distanced from their subject. Quite often, this detachment is self-imposed, other times it is brought upon by outside forces. However, this detachment is coupled with a curiosity, an eye for detail, a hunger for meaning extended to a degree that would not be sought had they insider status.
   
   Most books on China that I have seen are like a photograph taken on a day with a blinding sun. The subject is blanched by the extreme illumination, shadows are banished, yet the scene is still oddly unclear. Paraphrasing the Dao De Jing, the China that can be told of is not the true China. By attempting to consciously capture China in words, what comes into focus is not the subject but the author. In contrast, the Travelers' Tales is like the scene on its cover. By inviting shadows, allowing ambiguity, and eschewing overt commentary, the book does not describe China--it BECOMES China. Perhaps it is just the "Travelers' China," but even this is a better outcome than most other books I have seen.

3 comments about Peaks and Lamas: A Classic Book on Mountaineering, Buddhism and Tibet.

1. Next days, a english version.

   MARCO PALLIS. Peaks and Lamas. (Alfred A. Knopf, New York). - Bien qu'il ait déjà été parlé ici de cet ouvrage à deux reprises (nº de juin 1940 et de janvier-février 1947) nous devons y revenir encore pour signaler un important chapitre intitulé The Presiding Idea que l'au-teur y a ajouté spécialement pour l'édition américaine, et dans lequel il s'est attaché à définir d'une façon plus explicite le principe d'unité qui est propre à la civilisation thibétaine et qui la distingue des autres formes de civilisa-tions traditionnelles. Que ce principe se trouve dans la doctrine bouddhique, cela n'est pas douteux, mais une telle constatation est pourtant insuffisante, car, dans les pays autres que le Thibet où elle s'est exercée, l'influence du Bouddhisme a produit des résultats três différents. En fait, ce qui caractérise surtout la civilisation thibétaine, c'est l'importance prédominante qui y est donnée à un des éléments de cette doctrine, à un degré qui ne se renconlre nulle part ailleurs ; et cet élément est la conception de l'état de Bodhisaltwa, c'est-à-dire de " l'état de l'être pleinement éveillé qui, bien que n'étant plus lié par la Loi de Causalité qu'il a dépassée, continue cependant librement à suivre les vicissitudes de la Ronde de l'Existence en vertu de son identification avec toutes les créatures qui sont encore soumises à l'illusion égocentrique et à la souffrance qui en est la conséquence". Une apparente difficulté provient du fait que l'état de Bodhisattwa. est, d'autre part, considéré communément comme constituant un degré inférieur et préliminaire à celui de Buddha ; or cela ne semble guère pouvoir s'appliquer au cas d'un être "qui non seulement a réalisé le Vide, en un sens transcendant, mais qui aussi l'a réalisé dans le Monde même, en un sens immanent, cette double réalisationn'étant d'ailleurs qu'une pour lui", puisque la Connais-sance suprême qu'il possède est essentiellement "sans dualité" . La solution de cette difficulté paraît résider dans la distinction de deux usages différents du même terme Rodhisattwa : dans un cas, il est employé pour désigner le saint qui n'a pas encore atteint l'ultime degré de perfection, et qui est seulement sur le point d'y par-venir, tandis que, dans l'autre, il désigne en réalité un être , et natu-rellement, elle a aussi un rapport évident avec la doctrine des A vatâras. Dans la suite du chapitre, qu'il nous est impossible de résumer complètement ici, M. Pallis s'appli que a dissiper les confusions auxquelles cette conception du Bodhisatlwa pourrait donner lieu Si elle était fausse-ment interprétée, conformément à certaines tendances de la mentalité actuelle, en termes de sentimentalisme "al-truiste" ou soi-disant "mystique" ; puis il donne quel-ques exemples de ses applications constantes dans la vie spirituelle des Thibétains. L'un de ces exemples est la pratique de l'invocation, largement répandue dans tout l'ensemble de la population ; l'autre concerne particulière-ment le mode d'existence des naldjorpas, c'est-à-dire de ceux qui sont déjà plus ou moins avancés dans la voie de la réalisation, ou dont, tout au moins, les aspirations et les efforts sont définitivement fixés dans cette direction, et que les Thibétains, même relativement ignorants, regar-dent comme étant véritablement les protecteurs de l'huma-nité, sans l'activité "non-agissante" desquels elle ne tar-derait pas à se perdre irrémédiablement. René Guénon, 1949




2. Marco Pallis made several hiking treks with a number of companions into remote Himalayan regions in the 1930's. Primarily, this book is a narrative of those journeys.

   You will most likely not be able to find a writer in English today who can write so well, with such precision and yet lightness. Mr. Pallis takes us into the mountains of Ladakh and Sikkim, with an observant eye that can identify even the rare flowers along the path. An excellent chapter by his fellow traveler C.F.Kirkus gives us a first-hand account of a mountain-climbing experience that tested the nerves of the climbers and left them exhausted.

   The author's prose has true elegance, yet it is limpid and direct, so that the reader can easily imagine the delights of the almost pristine Himalayan mountain valleys and passes through which the explorers passed. We are given word-pictures of monasteries, remote towns, the interesting clothing worn by a mountain tribe, the landscape as one rounds a bend or climbs up a trail ... And the author weaves into this travelogue many observations about the beliefs and customs of the people he meets along the way. The sometimes vexing, sometimes humorous vicissitudes of traveling with porters and packs add lightness to the narrative. There are notes about the history of the region ... the reader quickly realizes how little we understand of this remote part of the world.

   We are taken along a metaphysical path as well. One chapter is given over to an explanation of the Doctrine, as it is called among the Tibetans whom the author so admires. The Buddhist influence is seen in the context of the Tibetan (perhaps one should say Himalayan) beliefs that take the reader into a world quite apart from our materialist concerns. In other chapters, Mr. Pallis discusses, somewhat in passing, the Tantra and the deities of Hinduism. His closing section on Tibetan art may seem esoteric to some readers, but will interest others who are specialists in that area.

   A fine book, with some of the rarefied air of the Himalayas in it ... Remember, Marco Pallis was a noted Tibetan scholar; his book will probably not appeal to a weekend or casual reader. However, if you enjoy fine prose and good travel writing, and wish to gain a greater appreciation of the metaphysical underpinnings of Buddhist and Tibetan thought, you will like this book.




3. On an expedition to the Ganges-Satleg watershed, Marco Pallis first began to study the lamas' teachings and way of life, studying Buddhism, Tibetan living, and art. Peaks And Lamas: A Classic Book On Mountaineering, Buddhism And Tibet has long been recognized as a 'bible' on the Himalayan-Tibetan tradition of Buddhism and mountain climbing, and this edition returns to print a classic which has been unavailable for thirty years, adding fine black and white photos taken by Pallis and his friends.