Paul Theroux celebrates fifty years of wandering the globe by collecting the best writing on travel from the books that shaped him, as a reader and a traveler. Part philosophical guide, part miscellany, part reminiscence, The Tao of Travel enumerates "The Contents of Some Travelers' Bags" and exposes "Writers Who Wrote About Places They Never Visited"; tracks extreme journeys in "Travel As An Ordeal" and highlights some of "Traveler's Favorite Places." Excerpts from the best of Theroux's own work are interspersed with selections from travelers both familiar and unexpected:
Vladimir Nabokov
Samuel Johnson
Evelyn Waugh
Susan Sontag
Charles Dickens
Henry David Thoreau
Mark Twain
Bruce Chatwin
Freya Stark
Graham Greene
JRR Tolkien
Eudora Welty
Isak Dineson
James Baldwin
Pico Iyer
Anton Chekhov
John McPhee
Peter Matthiessen
Ernest Hemingway, and more.

The Tao of Travel is a unique tribute to the pleasures and pains of travel in its golden age.