Ginnie's review
Dark Star Safari: Overland from Cairo to Capetown by Paul Theroux
The first of Theroux's books I ever read was The Great Railway Bazaar: by train through Asia. It was just what a travel memoir should be and it was a great introduction to all his other titles. These two serve almost as bookends to a luminous career. The saddest part of Dark Star was his return to the African villiage where he had been a Peace Corps teacher and seeing the earlier promise in ruins. Almost forty years ago, Theroux first went to Africa as a teacher in the Malawi bush. Now he stops at his old school, sees former students, revisits his African friends. He finds astonishing, devastating changes wherever he goes. "Africa is materially more decrepit than it was when I first knew it," he writes, "hungrier, poorer, less educated, more pessimistic, more corrupt, and you can't tell the politicians from the witch doctors. Not that Africa is one place. It is an assortme...more
My favorite of Theroux's travel books is "The Happy Isles of Oceania," about the islands of the Pacific, to which I'd never given much thought before I read the book.
