The Tao of Travel
by Paul Theroux
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Wanderlust
by Elisabeth Eaves
(Seal, $17)
“Travel and sexual conquest have long been cast as male impulses,” which doesn’t explain Elisabeth Eaves, said Zoe Slutzky in The New York Times. Eaves’s “often unflatteringly honest” new memoir about her early adulthood “reveals a life propelled by the perpetual desire to move—between places, between men, and toward the unknown—at all costs.” Think of Wanderlust as the anti–Eat, Pray, Love: “Rather than finding fulfillment in these encounters, Eaves feels an inexorable urge to run away.”
Andes
by Michael Jacobs
(Counterpoint, $25)
While traveling by plane, bus, and train down all 4,500 miles of the Andes, Englishman Michael Jacobs “relishes telling us how strange South Americans can be,” said Marie Arana in The Washington Post. For much of the way, his account is compelling because it parallels a similar journey Simón Bolívar took in the 19th century while liberating six nations. But the author’s condescension becomes too much. “We end up learning far more about Jacobs than the lands he has set out to describe.”
The Most Beautiful Walk in the World
by John Baxter
(HarperPerennial, $15)
John Baxter’s vivid book about walking in Paris “is as close as a reader can get to the feel of a languid spring walk along Baron Haussmann’s boulevards without actually being there,” said Susan Salter Reynolds in the Los Angeles Times. Baxter, who gives literary walking tours of the City of Light, clearly knows his way around a narrative as well as he knows his way around his adopted home city. He excels at “connecting a bakery to a park to a favorite shop to a literary anecdote.”