Volume 55, Number 20 · December 18, 2008
Seduced by Trains
By Ian Jack
Ghost Train to the Eastern Star: On the Tracks of the Great Railway Bazaar
by Paul Theroux
Houghton Mifflin, 496 pp., $28.00
Sometime during the mid-nineteenth century, writers discovered that traveling could be a lark. Disease might prevail in the tropics, but many of travel's other hazards had disappeared: reliable marine engines protected ships against currents and capricious winds, railway companies built sanitary hotels, rooms could be booked by wire, banditry was on the wane, and there were far fewer postillions to be struck by lightning.
Review, 4124 words
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