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 “Travelers’ Favorite Places.” Excerpts from the best of Theroux’s own work are interspersed with selections from travelers both familiar and unexpected:  Vladimir Nabokov           J.R.R. Tolkien  Samuel Johnson               Eudora Welty Evelyn Waugh                  Isak Dinesen  Charles Dickens               James Baldwin  Henry David Thoreau       Pico Iyer  Mark Twain                     Anton Chekhov  Bruce Chatwin                  John McPhee Freya Stark                      Peter Matthiessen  Graham Greene                Ernest Hemingway  The Tao of Travel is a unique tribute to the pleasures and pains of travel in its golden age.