Theroux (The Old Patagonian Express, The Great Railway Bazaar) spent a year exploring China by train, and his impressions about what has and has not changed in the country, as gathered in hundreds of conversations with Chinese citizens, make up a large portion of the book. The Cultural Revolution and the vandalism of the Red Guards have left scars on both the land and the people. Mao's death brought a collective sigh of relief from the population; reforms brought about under Deng Xiaoping have generally been welcomed. Still, this is not a political book. Whether describing his dealings with a rock-hard bureaucracy, musing over the Chinese flirtation with capitalismthey've ``turned the free market into a flea market''or commenting on the process of traveling, Theroux conducts the reader through this enormous country with wisdom, humor and a crusty warmth. Along the way are anecdotes about classic Chinese pornography (forbidden to the citizenry, but all right for ``foreign friends''); 35-below-zero weather; the Chinese penchant for restructuring nature; and the omnipresent thermos of hot water for making tea. The last chapter, ``The Train to Tibet,'' deals with the extremes to which the Chinese have gone in their attempts to subjugate the Tibetan people. Theroux develops an understanding of China through his travels, but he falls in love with Tibet. As in his previous works, he gives the reader much to relish and think about. BOMC featured selection. (May) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

Now firmly established as a cognoscente of train travel, with tracks already covered in The Great Railway Bazaar, The Old Patagonian Express, and Kingdom by the Sea, Theroux climbs aboard this familiar vehicle once again and gets his stubs punched for a rail trip through China. By the time Theroux reaches the Mao Museum in Shaoshan, with a full line of complaints about sloppy latrines and bad food in tow, one has the distinct impression that the author has just about had it up to here with the adventure of train travel. However, once the business of shuttling to and fro Theroux's destinations is squared away, the same attention to detail, eye for the offbeat, and fluid style that characterized his earlier work come to the fore. Theroux's itinerary calls for a departure by rail from London and a series of hook-ups that eventually lead him, entirely by surface, to China. A currious side-effect of the plan involves Theroux as a temporary member of a tour party, and one of the unexpected pleasures is Theroux's dry observations about this happy little group slowly getting on each other's nerves. Once in China, Theroux strikes out on his own, though, and busies himself with uncovering a portrait of China after the Cultural Revolution. Despite a sense that China continues to occupy something of a technological time warp--spittoons, quill pens, and steam engines aren't merely being preserved there, they're still being manufactured--Theroux detects concrete signs in attitude, style, and mobility of a major loosening up, though a collective memory of the Cultural Revolution still hovers ominously. But the subtext here is Theroux's contention that travel writing is a form of autobiography, and it's his own character as much as China's that unfolds by the time he winds up his tour in Tibet. In the end, Theroux comes through on his claim that travel has little to do with the rituals of sightseeing; when he's told that Min Hong is unsuitable for tourists, our man heads straight for the place: engrossing, revelatory work from a seasoned pro. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Theroux's penchant for train travel is well knownhis Great Railway Bazaar and The Old Patagonian Express are modern travel classics. On his latest jaunt he takes almost a year to crisscross China, traveling on 40 trains from the southern tropics to the wastelands of the Gobi in western Xinjiang to the dense metropolises of Shanghai, Beijing, and Canton. What emerges is a curious melange of ancient and modern: while some things are literally changing overnight, the Chinese still manufacture spittoons and steam engines. For Theroux, traveling is both about peopletheir thoughts, customs, and peculiaritiesand a form of autobiography, and here we learn as much about his own quirks and fancies as we do about the intriguing world of contemporary China. Laurence Hull, Cannon Memorial Lib., Concord, N.C. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.