Posts Tagged ‘travel memoir’

Paul Theroux is the author of many highly acclaimed books. His novels include The Lower River and The Mosquito Coast, and his renowned travel books include Ghost Train to the Eastern Star and Dark Star Safari.

Paul Theroux has spent fifty years crossing the globe, adventuring in the exotic, seeking the rich history and folklore of the far away. 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.

On road trips spanning four seasons, wending along rural highways, Theroux visits gun shows and small-town churches, laborers in Arkansas, and parts of Mississippi where they still call the farm up the road “the plantation.” He talks to mayors and social workers, writers and reverends, the working poor and farming families — the unsung heroes of the south, the people who, despite it all, never left, and also those who returned home to rebuild a place they could never live without.

Pico Iyer is the author of twelve books, on subjects as varied as Cuba, globalism, Graham Greene and the XIVth Dalai Lama, and writes up to 100 articles a year for magazines from The New York Review of Books to Harper’s, and Vanity Fair to Wired. He delivered popular TED talks in both 2013 and 2014—his most recent book is a small TED Original on the theme of stillness, and his talk on the nature of home attracted millions of viewers—and he has written a film script for Miramax, done many liner notes for Leonard Cohen and written introductions to more than 50 other books. Born in Oxford, England, and educated at Eton, Oxford and Harvard, he has been based, since 1987, in Western Japan, while traveling widely, everywhere from North Korea to Ethiopia and Yemen to Easter Island.