The Tao of Travel: Enlightenments from Lives on the Road by Paul Theroux

Abstract

was upon his return from his Hajj that Malcolm broke from the Nation of Islam and founded Muslim Mosque, Inc. Soon thereafter, from the pulpit, he denounced the serial infidelities and the multiple illegitimate children fathered by the Messenger of Allah. That denunciation was Malcolm’s death warrant. As for the subtitle, I sensed less a conscious attempt to continually reinvent himself than the imperious need to transform his society. Detroit Red needed to be metamorphosized into Malcolm X, of course, but his American society needed a quasireligious transformation as well. We are indebted to the late Manning Marable for choosing, as did Alex Haley, to resuscitate the life experience of Malcolm Little. Robert H. McCormick Jr. Franklin College, Switzerland Judith Schalansky. Atlas of Remote Islands: Fifty Islands I Have Never Set Foot on and Never Will. Christine Lo, tr. New York. Penguin. 2010. isbn 9780143118206 Born in East Germany during the Soviet era, Judith Schalansky was raised a prisoner in her own country. While legally bound by German Democratic Republic borders, she undertook her first voyage around the world when she traced her finger from the GDR to the Galápagos Islands (by way of the Panama Canal, at her mother’s suggestion ). Schalansky later earned degrees in both history of art and communication design, and now writes and teaches courses in typography at the Potsdam Technical Institute. The sum of her life’s experiences thus far, Atlas of Remote Islands combines gripping narrative, brilliant typography, and, overall, remarkably intelligent and informative design to tell richly imaginative stories from fifty of the world’s most remote islands. Schalansky’s love of maps was spawned by necessity and nurtured by circumstance, but that doesn’t prevent her from petitioning her readers (quite effectively) with each new page and urging them to see what she sees: a map is so much more than a utilitarian device for locating your position and finding your way. Her love for maps is immediately infectious. Lonely Island is a desolate, uninhabited Russian territory in the Arctic Ocean. It’s altogether void of noteworthy history, but Schalansky manages to make this twenty-squarekilometer icy blip on the globe interesting . Mystical, even. And the stories only get better from there. The island of Rapa Iti is the eventual home of Marc Liblin who, at the age of six, claimed to have been taught the island’s mysterious native language in his dreams while living in a small French town. Floreana is a small island whose two original settlers begrudgingly shared their solitary paradise with three new inhabitants , and following an island drama known only to its characters, four inhabitants die and one returns to the mainland to face speculation. And the twelve hundred inhabitants of Tikopia exercise heartbreaking population control in an effort to secure the future of their utopian existence. Schalansky notes her amazement that Los Angeles is an actual place where people are born and live. Likewise , the curious reader can’t help going to Google to search for additional information about each island, amazed that these places actually exist. These fantastic tales are true. The most stirring element in the collective history of these islands is the horrifying truth that even in paradise, we can’t escape how painfully human we are. These exotic islands, with perfect climates and beautiful beaches, are ripe with cruelty and suffering. Isolated from the corrupt culture of the mainland, these islands fare no better. Perhaps this is what Schalansky meant when she titled her introduction “Paradise is an island. So is hell.” John Tyler Allen New York City Paul Theroux. The Tao of Travel: Enlightenments from Lives on the Road. New York. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt . 2011. isbn 9780547336916 The Tao of Travel is a delightful collection of un-commonplace remarks and episodes by writers who have traveled, edited by a master of the genre. Even writers who have not traveled happily make for good reading, especially when a summer heat dome or winter ’s sub-zero has driven one indoors. Such conditions affirm Huysmans’s thought that “the imagination could 78 | World Literature Today wltreviews Zhao Lihong A Boat to Heaven Southword Editions Chinese poet Zhao experienced the...