​The “Godfather of contemporary travel writing” has probably chronicled more places in the world than almost any other author. The second page of his book lists the forty Theroux publications, which gives one a sense of what a prolific writer he is. This is his third volume of essays, following Sunrise with Seamonsters (1984) and Fresh Air Fiend (2001), for a total of 134 essays written over 53 years. This new collection of essays is a veritable cornucopia of sights, characters, and experiences covering the globe.  I concur with Theroux’s own critique for what makes a superior travel book when assessing this one, as “not just a report of a journey, but a memoir, an autobiography, a confession, a foray in South American (in this case the world) topography and history, a travel narrative, with observations of books, music, and life in general; in short, what the best travel books are, a summing up.” The collection includes varied topics and showcases his sheer versatility as a writer. As always, Theroux writes with irony and misanthropy, which partially explain his unique perspective on so many aspects of life.
The title of the book is based on a 1945 painting by the Irish-born artist known for his grotesque, emotionally charged, raw imagery, which is based on a photograph of Eric Hall dozing on a seat in Hyde Park that, according to Theroux, sums up all travel writing and many essays. In order to visit the wealthy and powerful as well as the common people, one must travel on the cheap and dress down. In the introduction of the book he provides insights into what makes a good travel writer, such as seeing the “underside, its hinterlands, its everyday life” if you want to get at the truth of a country, which is what he strives to do in many of the stories of this book. He also cautions not to be in a hurry when traveling through a new country and always go low-tech. Theroux doesn’t carry high-tech items like a cell phone, camera or computer because they’re fragile and irreplaceable and are the target of robberies. As Theroux puts it, “Who steals notebooks?”
Theroux goes on with, “The freelancer is guided by curiosity and must, in its pursuit, be uncompromising, never betraying his or her gift by writing badly or in haste…” and “At its best, the freelance writer lives a life of happy accidents.” His example is an assignment in China in 1980, on a Yangtze River cruise, which led to more assignments in China and eventually a year-long travel for “Riding the Iron Rooster.” According to Theroux, one of the advantages in the randomness of this sort of freelance writing life is that one makes a reasonable living without having to, “put one’s work aside and enter a classroom, or apply for a fellowship, or be some sort of consultant…”
His reflections on the state of the media today seem most timely, “As I write, magazines are closing, few television programs interview serious writers, and (apart from NPR) radio is mainly music and sports talk. The writing professional that I have always known is changing, old media is ossified, and what I know of new media is that it is casual, opinionated, improvisational, largely unedited, full of whoppers, often plagiarized, and poorly paid….”, leading him to believe that the “barbarians are at the gate, because they have always been there, giving writers a reason to be vigilant, and unsparing, and fully employed.”
His travel essays take us to Ecuador, Zimbabwe and Hawaii, among other places. He even includes a chapter on the theme, “Traveling Beyond Google” where he rails against the “don’t go there” know-it-all, stay-at-home finger-waggers who warn against what are often the best travel experiences. He reminds us how the natural disasters and unprovoked cruelty that one comes across on the road can be “…an enrichment, even a blessing, one of the trophies of travel, the life-altering journey.” He was even forced to tell one genial Canadian who was complaining about the horrors in some of the countries he recently visited that the place they were talking about was just a few miles from what a local newspaper labeled, “America’s homicide capital”—Camden, New Jersey.
Theroux did heed one finger-wagger in 1973 while passing through Singapore who warned against visiting Khmer Rouge controlled Cambodia. He pointed to the difference of traveling in a country where the state of law prevails and one in a state of anarchy, so he went to Vietnam, which wasn’t without risks, as the country was “defenselessly adrift in a fatalistic limbo of whispers and guerrilla attacks…”  But the real story wouldn’t actually emerge for another thirty-three years when he returned on his “Ghost Train to the Eastern Star” journey. He returned to Hue, which had been a “hellhole” during the war to find happiness after war and “almost unimaginably, there can be forgiveness.”  According to Theroux, “Seven million tons of bombs had not destroyed Vietnam; if anything, they had unified it…”.   He went on to observe that Hanoi, which had suffered more than most cities from aerial bombardment during the war, looked “...wondrous in its postwar prosperity, with boulevards and villas, ponds and pagodas, as glorious as it had been when it was the capital of Indochina, certainly one of the most successful and loveliest architectural restorations of any city in the world.”  Lesson learned, “…while weighing the risks and being judicious, travel in an uncertain world, in a time of change, has never seemed to me more essential, of great importance, or more enlightening.”
Ecuador and the upper Amazon would be one of the first places Theroux introduces us in search of the “grail of psychotropics”, which was inspired by William Burroughs’ account of a drug search in Peru and down Colombia’s Rio Putumayo in his “The Yage Letters.” According to these letters, “Yage is yaje, Banisteriopsis caapi: vine of the soul, secret nectar of the Amazon, the shaman’s holy drink, the ultimate poison, miracle cure. More generally known as ayahuasca…” a word Theroux found “bewitching.” This trek would fulfil one of Theroux’s primary reasons to travel, “…to find obstacles, to discover my limits, to ease the passage of time, to reassure myself  that innocence and antiquity exist, to search for links to the past, to flee from the nastiness of urban life and the paranoia, if not outright dementia, of the technological World…”.
Theroux would consult his fellow Returned Peace Corps Volunteer, friend and “self-exiled writer,” Moritz Thomsen, on the location of “ayahuasqueros” along the river people in eastern Ecuador. He signed up for an “Ethnobotanical experience,” whose organizers characterized it as eight days in the rainforest, for eco-awareness and spiritual solidarity, to learn the names and uses of beneficial plants. They’d live in a traditional village of the indigenous Secoya people on Ecuador’s Oriente region on a narrow branch of Burroughs’ Putumayo, “where the ayahuasca vine clinging to the trunks of rainforest trees grows as thick as a baby’s arm.”
Almost immediately Theroux felt uneasy being part of what turned out to be a “nervous and ill-assorted bunch,”  but fortunately he met the “vegetalista,” Don Pablo, who he could trust and according to Theroux, “remains one of the most gifted, insightful and charismatic people I have met in my life.” Theroux even confided in problems writing his latest novel, at which point Don Pablo spoke about the “Eye of Understanding.”  “This eye can see things that can’t be seen physically,” he said, “Some people have this third eye already developed. And for others, the Eye of Understanding can be acquired through ayahuasca or some other jungle plants.” On several occasions, Theroux was able to separate from the group with a local guide and learn more about the local culture and topography.
When reflecting on the trip, Theroux realized that it had not been an ethno-botany trip of shamanism as an encounter with child prostitutes, gunrunners, Big Oil, and blighted jungle, a place surrounded by FARC guerrillas. The diminishing number of Secoyas seemed doomed. That village would soon be swallowed by the encroachment of oil people, who were only half a day’s march through the forest.” The trip had offered glimpses of danger, but what separates adventure from disaster, according to Theroux, is that you live to tell the tale.
Theroux’s book includes some gems of literary criticism and reveals real depth about the work of one of my favorite travel authors, Graham Greene, and also of David Thoreau, Joseph Conrad, and Hunter Thompson. Of Graham Greene, Theroux reminds us that he, “…lived and thrived, in an age where writers were powerful, priest-like, remote, and elusive…”  I’m one of those who worshipped anything Greene wrote, especially “Journey Without Maps” and “Heart of the Matter,” since I’d worked in Sierra Leone for several years. Yet Theroux brings a new level of insights into many authors and famous people.  In this case, he was familiar with Greene’s official biographer, Norman Sherry, who occupied the same office chair Theroux would hold at the University of Singapore. According to Theroux, “Aware that he led a hidden life, Greene developed a habit of evasion, which was an almost pathological inability to come clean. His secretiveness led him at times to keep a parallel diary, in which he might chronical two versions of his day, one rather sober and preoccupied, and the other perhaps detailing a frolic with a prostitute…” He goes on to say that “Greene was a restless traveler, a committed writer, a terrible husband, an appalling father, and an admitted manic-depressive…”
Much to my surprise, Theroux points out that “Green’s book is an ingeniously worked-up account of only four weeks in the Liberian bush by an absolute beginner in Africa. Greene admits this early on. “I had never been out of Europe before; I was a complete amateur at travel in Africa. The book lacked humor, it was dark and broadly political, according to Theroux, and eighteen months after it was published it was withdrawn due to a threatened libel suit.  The book is filled with misinformation and distorted beliefs about Africa, according to Theroux. That Liberia was unmapped, and that cannibalism was a threat, although it was not practiced except in the minds of timid fantasists, whom one does not normally lump together with modern cartographers.”
When Greene returned to Africa in 1942 to do wartime intelligence work, he stuck to Freetown, Sierra Leone, as the backdrop for “The Heart of the Matter” and, according to Theroux, “Africa is not the subject, but the shadowy backdrop for this essentially inward-looking novel that questions the elements of belief and damnation, heaven and hell.” The reason the book is one of Greene’s best, “is perhaps that he was desperate the whole way through, and that in some important aspects the trip was the fulfillment of his childhood fantasies.” In retrospect, in his seventies, and on the anniversary of this trip, he wrote his cousin Barbara, who made the trip with him, “To me that trip has been very important—it started a love of Africa that has never quite left me…Altogether a trip which altered life.”
Biking enthusiast and comic extraordinaire, Robin Williams, is one of his most fascinating public figures Theroux introduces the reader to, and he could be better understood through psychologist Oliver Sacks, who was also profiled along with Elizabeth Taylor and a Manhattan dominatrix. Initially I was surprised at the profile of Dr. Oliver Sacks until I realized that Robin Williams starred in the Oscar nominated film in 1990 based on his Dr. Sacks book, entitled “Awakening”, which was published in 1973.  Although Sack’s story is fascinating, much of what he learned reveal some of the psychological issues facing Williams.
Theroux was fascinated by Dr. Sacks’ “Street Neurology,” which refers to the assessment of a person’s condition after observing their behavior in a casual setting. He said that Sacks has “something of Sherlock Holmes in this shrewd summing up of scattered neurological clues…” Dr. Sacks considered that Sherlock Holmes was possibly “autistic” and Samuel Johnson “tourettic” based on his neurological experience. Sacks proved that a person’s so-called handicap often causes the development of new skills or the discovery of assets. He was a listener of “seismographic sensitivity, a clear-sighted and inspired observer, attentive, with an eloquence that allows him to describe a person’s condition with nuance and subtlety.”
Actually, since the filming of “Awakenings,” he’d become a friend of Robin Williams and claimed that, “There is no one like Robin.” His insights would inform Theroux’s quest to determine, “Who’s he (Robin) when he’s at home?” After attending Julliard’s in New York City, Williams found that he expressed himself with the greatest freedom in stand-up comedy, especially late night comedy clubs, with such a crazed take on the world he seemed like a Martian, which led to his first success, Mork & Mindy (1978-1982). This period included a coked-out life marked by the death of his close friend, John Belushi, from a drug overdose. Williams freely admitted his lifestyle was self-destructive, which included excessive cocaine use and bingeing in general. Include heavy drinking, grossly overweight, using cocaine, under exercised, no discipline, “Just parties”—his self-esteem was low and he fortified his ego with performances in comedy clubs—the Comedy Store and the Improv.
 
During a day of biking with Williams in Marin County, Theroux got to know him better and was convinced that if he were not able to move people to laughter, he would be nearly “defenseless.” Dr. Sacks considered Robin” hyperspontaneious,” and suggested that he verges on the Tourettic,  given to alarming impulses and wild associations, those same shouts and barks. “He is never better than doing stand-up comedy in front of a live nightclub audience. It is vivid and transcendent obscenity.”  He went on to say, “Anarchic wit is not possible without experience of a very dark side.” When Theroux requested clarification, Dr. Sacks said, “There must have been grim and difficult passages in his past.” Both Dr. Sacks and Theroux identified many of the factors that led to Williams’ tragic death by hanging in 2014, and although this essay was evidently written before his death, since the essays in this book go as far as 2016, a “post script” from Theroux summing up Williams’ life and the tragic circumstances of his death would have been helpful.
One of Theroux’s several stories in Africa about the seizure of commercial farms by President Mugabe in Zimbabwe set the stage for his take on the continent, “I love the African bush; I hate African cities. After my last Africa trip, I swore that I would never go back to the stinking buses, the city streets reeking of piss, the lying politicians, the schemers, the twaddlers, the crooks, the money changers taking advantage of weak currency and gullible people, the American God-botherers and evangelists demanding baptisms and screaming, “Sinners!”—and forty years of virtue-industry CEOs faffing around with other people’s money and getting no results, except Africans asking for more.
Theroux builds on what he perceives as the negative impact of outsiders on Africa with his profile of the rock star, Bono, in his essay, “The Rock Star’s Burden” with, “…While there are probably more annoying things than being hectored about African development by an overpaid and semi-educated Irish rock star with a goofy name and a cowboy hat, I can’t think of one at the moment…”.  Much of his venting on the subject is due to return visits to Malawi where he was a Peace Corps volunteer and found that it, “…has worse education, more plagued by illness and bad services, and poorer than it was when I lived and worked there in the early sixties, but it is not for lack of outside help or donor money. Malawi has been the beneficiary of many thousands of foreign teachers, doctors and nurses, and large amounts of financial aid, yet it has declined from a country with promise to a failed state.”
He strengthens his point with, “When the Malawi minister of education stole the entire education budget of millions of dollars in 2,000, and the Zambian president stole even more a year later, and Nigeria squandered its oil wealth, what happened? Bono and other simplifiers of Africa’s problems kept calling for debt relief and more aid. I got a dusty reception lecturing at the Gates Foundation when I pointed out the successes of responsible policies in Botswana, compared to the kleptomania of its neighbors, the tens of millions that have been embezzled by politicians in Zambia and Malawi. Donors enable this behavior by turning a blind eye to bad governance and the actual reasons these countries are failing.” Spoken like a true Returned Peace Corps Volunteer and world traveler who appreciates the complexity of real development.
The last four chapters provide a rare glimpse of what makes the man and one of the most prolific travel—Returned Peace Corps Volunteer authors of modern time. “My Life as a Reader” confirms that many great authors are prolific readers. “…Reading has been my refuge, my pleasure, my enlightenment, my inspiration, my word-hunger, often verging on gluttony. In idle moments without a book, I read the labels on my clothes or the ingredients panel on cereal boxes. My version of hell is an existence without a thing to read, that I would hope to correct it by writing something…”  He goes on to reflect, “Reading took off the long dark African nights and gave me relief and hope, for no matter how badly the day went, a book was waiting for me at home, and this has continued to be the cast.” He even divides the world between those who read and those who don’t “…reading cannot be compartmentalized; it is a skill and a pleasure that needs to be inspired, so that it becomes a lifelong passion.”
“I did not set out to be a writer. My desire was to be a medical doctor, but this was thwarted by ten years of travel, during which I fell into writing, served an apprenticeship, and fifty years went by, and I am still at it. To me, what writers read is as interesting as what they write… For my Tao of Travel, I read about 350 books and quoted from many of them. The pages of my work are filled with references to books I’ve loved.” As an avid reader, I appreciate an author who does his research and reads many more books that I ever could.
In “Dear Old Dad: Memories of My Father,” we learn some startling facts about the author. “My father—whom I loved and who loved me—never read a word I wrote, or if he did, never mentioned that fact. It was like an embarrassing secret we shared, of a creepy proclivity I had, something that we couldn’t discuss without awkwardness…” He further clarifies this disconnect with, “My father did not read novels—anyone’s novels, at least not modern ones,.. And I had not become a writer to please my parents, only myself. A writer is rarely able to do both, and I know that, far from wishing to please them, I wrote as an act of rebellion.”
Theroux had an even more estranged relationship with his mother who “was a mercurial, insecure woman—as domineering people often are—and she feared me for my defiant aloofness. I knew this, and made myself more noncommittal and cooler. It antagonized her that she didn’t know what was in my head…” This relationship was further strained when Theroux “fled” with a girl to Puerto Rico and upon her return she went to a “home” near Boston where she delivered a baby at the Mass. General. She gave the baby up for adoption, and he found out almost forty years later that the boy had been educated at an Ivy League college and ended up a multimillionaire. Both Theroux’s parents were disappointed, but according to Theroux, “But when I had needed them, they did not help, could not help, and simply were not there, except— in my mother’s case — to blame. It was a great lesson to me, a motto for my escutcheon: I am alone in this world.”
Theroux further reflects on his father with, “Memories, fragments, generalizations—what do they add up to? This recollection of mine seems insubstantial, yet that itself is a revelation. I thought I knew him well. On reflection, I see he was strange, and he seems to recede as I write, as sometimes when I asked him a question about himself, he backed away. In writing about him like this, I realize I do not know what was in his heart. He is just like those skinny old men in Burma and Thailand and Vietnam who inspired me to think of him.”
And yet Theroux sometimes felt that he was his father, “My father hated gabbers, gasbaggers, and ear benders, and so do I. My father had a way of inhaling deeply through his nose when he was impatient, and I do it, too…I have a similar temperament. I am generally humane, relatively serene, and like to be left alone, as he did. I will sometimes agree to anything to keep the peace, because he felt (as I do) that you can’t really change the narrow stubborn mind of a person who is set in his belief, and anyway why bother?”
Theroux felt that his mother was literally killing his father, and described the relationship between them as, “If there was a lesson for me, these family experiences resolved themselves in my horror of weak and vain, nagging and castrating women. As soon as I sense an echo of my mother in a woman’s voice, I recognize the snarl of a she-wolf and flee….but only the one thing I’ve failed to do, ultimately a cynicism and a merciless refusal to see my pain—when in my life I’ve heard those things, or heard something as subtle as a sniff, a snort, a harrumph, a certain tilt of the head. I have mentally shut myself down and vowed to end the relationship, because I do not want to become the person that my father became in his old age, reduced to dependence on an unhappy woman who not only didn’t know what she wanted, but needed, most of all, someone to blame.”
In the end, Theroux’s father wanted to be left alone. “He would have been appalled if he ever got wind of instances of my wayward behavior.  I had a mediocre school record. I was arrested by the police at a campus demonstration in 1962 in Amherst. I had fathered an illegitimate child. I was kicked out of the Peace Corp (“terminated early”) in 1965 for a number of transgressions, my first wife and I split up in 1990, I wrote umpteen books—and these events or topics were never mentioned at all, and perhaps in my father’s mind they never happened. Or was it because they were “faits accompli” that there was nothing to say?”
In the final essay, “The Trouble with Autobiography,” Theroux provides 500 words, which “are all I will ever write of my autobiography.” At the age of 67, he asked the question, “Do I write my life or leave it to others to deal with?” He has no intentions of writing about his life, and plans to put obstacles in the way of those who try, since, “Biography lends to death a new terror.” He claims that Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast is “glittering miniaturism, but largely self-serving portraiture, was posthumous…” Theroux harkens back to the “mysterious B. Traven” (born Otto Feige in Germany), author of The Treasure of the Sierra Madre and ten other novels, who succeeded in frustrating any biographers by assuming multiple identities, changing his name three or four times, and living as a recluse in Mexico. He wrote, “The creative person should have no other biography than his books.”
Theroux goes on to say that autobiography is an “unreliable little creature, or even a loose and baggy monster. This form of personal narrative exerts a horrible fascination on me. When a writer’s autobiography is published, I pounce on it. I want to know what this lonely business was like for him or her…” In the end, he also provides the readers of this book with many fascinating details of his life.   
I totally agree with Theroux that, as a reader, we should not be reading books, but reading the author, “devouring all the novels and stories, and then whatever biography I could find.”  I’ve read about a quarter of his books, so I have many more adventures to look forward to.  Theroux was last sighted in Mexico, probably working on his next book. I can’t wait!
 

Reviewer Mark Walker was a Peace Corps Volunteer in Guatemala. After earning an MA in Latin American Studies from the University of Texas in Austin, Mark co-founded a Guatemalan development agency and then managed child sponsorship programs for Plan International in Guatemala, Colombia and Sierra Leone. He has held senior fundraising positions for several groups like CARE International, MAP International, Make-A-Wish International, and was the CEO of Hagar. Most recently, he completed a fundraising study for the National Peace Corps Association as a VP at Carlton & Co.
His involvement promoting “World Community Service” programs led to his receiving the most prestigious Service Above Self Award from the Rotary International Foundation, and all three of his children have participated in Rotary’s Youth Exchange program. His memoir, Different Latitudes: My Life in the Peace Corps and Beyond, won Honorable Mention in the Arizona Literary Award competition. An article with the same title was published in the Summer 2017 edition of Advancing Philanthropy. He’s published several other essays, including the featured article in the May 2018 issue of Revue Magazine, “The Making of the Kingdom of Mescal: An Adult Indian Fairy-Tale”; “The Fundraiser: Running risks in Nepal and Bolivia,” in the Spring issue of World View; “My Life in the Land of the Eternal Spring” is in the July issue of “Ragazine,” and will be in the fall issue of the “Crossing Class Anthology,” published by Wising Up Press.  Mark’s wife and three children were born in Guatemala and now live in Scottsdale, Arizona.
 
Product details

• Hardcover: 416 pages
• Publisher: Eamon Dolan/Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (May 8, 2018)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0544870301
• ISBN-13: 978-0544870307
• Product Dimensions: 6 x 1.3 x 9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.3 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars 19 customer reviews
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #44,338 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #3 in Books > Travel > Africa > Zimbabwe
  • #252 in Books > Reference > Writing, Research & Publishing Guides > Writing > Travel
  • #264 in Books > Travel > Travel Writing

 

​Reviewed by Mark D. Walker
I learned about the author on an “American Masters” documentary, “Words from a Bear” that portrayed him as a voice of Native American Renaissance in art and literature, which led to a breakthrough of Native American literature into the mainstream. Like many Americans, my awareness of the Native American was raised by historian Dee Brown’s 1970 best-selling book, “Bury my Heart at Wounded Knee,” which told about the massacre of several hundred Lakota Indians (mostly women and children) by soldiers of the U.S. Army. The author was brought up around places I’d lived and worked in Oklahoma, New Mexico and Arizona, and this book had received a Pulitzer Prize for Literature.
The main character, Abel, has come home to New Mexico from war only to find himself caught between two worlds. The one world is modern and industrial, claiming his soul and leading him into a destructive, compulsive cycle of depravity and despair. The author expresses a wariness of the white man’s world and language,
On every side of him, there are words by the millions, an unending succession of pamphlets and papers, letters and books, bills and bulletins, commentaries and conversations. He has diluted and multiplied the Word, and words have begun to close in upon him. He is sated and insensitive; his regard for language—for the World itself—as an instrument of creation has diminished nearly to the point of no return. It may be that he will perish by the Word.
 
Alcoholism is often a part of the despair Abel experiences,
 
He had gone out the first and second days and got drunk. He wanted to go out on the third, but he had no money and it was bitter cold and he was sick and in pain. He had been there six days at dawn, listening to his grandfather’s voice. He heard it now, but it had no meaning. The random words fell together and made no sense.
 
In contrast, his grandfather would orient him to the rhythm of the seasons, the harsh beauty of the Southwest, and the ancient rites and traditions of his people.
 
These things he told his grandsons carefully, slowly and at length, because they were old and true, and they could be lost forever as easily as one generation is lost to the next, as easily as on old man might lose his voice….And he knew they knew, (his grandsons) and he took them with him to the fields and they cut open the earth and touched the corn and ate sweet melons in the sun.
 
Considered by some as the “dean” of Native American writers, he was proficient in fiction, poetry, painting and printmaking.  He’s used his familiarity with Native American life and legend with the modern world, building a bridge between the two. He described this as follows,
“I lived on the Navajo reservation when I was little. And I lived on two of the Apache reservations, and lived at the Pueblo of Jemez (west of Santa Fe, New Mexico) for the longest period of time…I had a Pan-Indian experience as a child, even before I knew what that term meant.”
In an interview in the American Poetry Review, he recalls, “I saw people who were deeply involved in their traditional life, in the memories of their blood. They had, as far as I could see, a certain strength and beauty that I find missing in the modern world at large. I like to celebrate that involvement in my writing.”
In 1958, Momaday received his BA degree from the University of New Mexico and entered the graduate program at Stanford University, where the celebrated critic, poet and scholar, Yvor Winters, had first selected Momaday as the year’s only creative writing fellow in poetry and would become the aspiring poet’s advisor. He went on to get his PhD, and in 1962, he received the Academy of American Poets prize for his poem, “The Bear.”
He’d become an associate professor of English and comparative literature at the University of California, Berkeley where he designed a graduate Indian studies program and developed a course in Indian oral tradition, which has been taught ever since at Berkeley, Stanford and the University of Arizona. For twenty-nine years, he’d be a consultant to the National Endowment for the Humanities and the National Endowment for the Arts.  
The New York Times Book Review found this book, “as subtly wrought as a piece of Navajo silverware.” And I’d agree with the critique of this book from The Paris Review, “both a masterpiece about the universal human condition and a masterpiece of Native American literature.”
 
Product details
·        Series: P.S.
·        Paperback: 224 pages
·        Publisher: Harper Perennial Modern Classics; Anniversary edition (December 11, 2018)
·        Language: English
·        ISBN-10: 0062909959
·        ISBN-13: 978-0062909954
·        Product Dimensions: 5.3 x 0.5 x 8 inches
·        Shipping Weight: 6.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
·        Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars   127 customer reviews
·        Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #8,246 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
o   #32 in Native American Literature (Books)
o   #110 in Classic American Literature
o   #73 in Cultural Heritage Fiction
 

Walker was a Peace Corps Volunteer in Guatemala and spent over forty years helping disadvantaged people in the developing world. He came to Phoenix as a Senior Director for Food for the Hungry, worked with other groups like Make-A-Wish International and was the CEO of Hagar USA, a Christian-based organization that supports survivors of human trafficking.

His book, Different Latitudes: My Life in the Peace Corps and Beyond, was recognized by the Arizona Literary Association for Non-Fiction and, according to the Midwest Review, “…is more than just another travel memoir. It is an engaged and engaging story of one man’s physical and spiritual journey of self-discovery…”
 
Several of his articles have been published in Ragazine and WorldView Magazines, Literary Yard, Literary Travelers and Quail BELL, while another appeared in "Crossing Class: The Invisible Wall" anthology published by Wising Up Press.  His reviews have been published by Revue Magazine, as well as Peace Corps Worldwide, and he has his own column in the “Arizona Authors Association” newsletter, “The Million Mile Walker Review: What We’re Reading and Why.” His essay, “Hugs not Walls: Returning the Children,” was a winner in the Arizona Authors Association literary competition 2020 and reissued in “Revue Magazine.”
 
His honors include the "Service Above Self" award from Rotary International. He’s the membership chair for “Partnering for Peace.”  His wife and three children were born in Guatemala. You can learn more at www.MillionMileWalker.com and follow him on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/millionmilewalker/
 
 

“The Long Night of White Chickens” was my introduction to the author and I’ve been a fan ever since. His mother is a Catholic Guatemalan, his father Jewish American, and he was born in Boston, so he started off with a very interesting combination of influences. The book is a tense, almost surrealistic detective story which opens windows on the Latin American reality of State Sponsored assassinations, mara youth gangs and organized crime.
The author’s insights come out of his coverage of the wars in Central America in the 1980s as a contributing editor to Harper’s magazine. His book is a non-fiction account of the assassination of Guatemalan Catholic Bishop Juan Jose Gerardi Conedera by the Guatemalan military. The book was an expansion of an article in the New Yorker, plus seven years of painstaking and often dangerous journalistic investigation.
The Bishop was Guatemala’s leading human rights activist and was bludgeoned to death in his garage, which is only a few hundred feet from the government’s most sophisticated security units and surveillance apparatus. All of this took place two days after a groundbreaking church-sponsored report implicating the military in the murders and disappearances of some 200,000 civilians. The author tells how the church formed an investigative team comprised of secular young men in their twenties known as “Los Intocables” (the Untouchables) due to the expected lack of interest of police investigators, not to mention the inability of the existing legal system to solve what was known in Guatemala as “The Crime of the Century.”  In what would be his first non-fiction book, the author managed to reach and interview witnesses that no other reporter or authority was able to access and witnessed first-hand some of the crucial developments in the case unfolding before him.
The author’s painstaking research would reveal that in 1980 Gerardi would become Bishop of the Quiche diocese, which was the country’s most populous Indian province, and barely escaped an assassination attempt himself. One of his biggest mistakes, according to the author, was to close the diocese due to the threats of attack.  Before the civil war ended, “…more priests, nuns, and religious workers would be “martyred” by violence …than in any other diocese in the Americas.”
The author’s investigation also reveals the involvement of the U.S. in creating some of the circumstances that led to the bloody civil war which…”was a consequence of a coup re-engineered by the CIA in 1954 against Jacobo Arbenz, only the second democratically elected president in Guatemala’s history…”  A reality confirmed from a remarkable apology by President Clinton on a visit to Guatemala in 1999 when he sat next to the stony faced President Arzu, and said:  “It is important that I state clearly that support for military forces or intelligence units that engaged in violent and widespread repression of the kind described in the report was wrong…and the United States must not repeat that mistake.”
The author takes the reader through the byzantine legal system in Guatemala, which included constant threats against the lives of Judges (several of whom had to leave the country in fear of their lives) and witnesses. Many of the rulings on the case were flawed, at best, as was the case with the Fourth Court of Appeals where important witness records were not even requested by the appellate judges and “Judge Wilewaldo Contreras’s court had issued a precooked ruling.”
Finally, in January of 2006,  the author would receive a “confirmation” by email that the Supreme Court had upheld the convictions and twenty-year sentences for several of the perpetrators, the Limas. Although the author tells of his feelings of astonishment and relief at hearing the news, the attempts to limit and delay the conviction would go on until April of 2007 when a new judge took over as president of the Constitutional Court, and within days—on April 25th, the day before the ninth anniversary of the murder of Bishop Gerardi—the Public Ministry was notified that the guilty verdicts against the Limas and Father Mario had finally been upheld.
The author provides an afterword, a list of appearances of the different characters in the story and a chronology of events, as well as source notes and an index to what is a well written, dramatic piece of Guatemalan history, which says a lot about the chaos and issues forcing so many to flee their homes more than ten years later.  The author has written for the New Yorker, the New York Times Magazine, and Harper’s to mention a few publications. He divides his time between Brooklyn and Mexico City and teaches creative writing and literature at Trinity College.
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• Paperback: 416 pages
• Publisher: Grove Press; Reprint edition (September 1, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0802143857
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#2983 in Murder & Mayhem True Accounts

​Moritz Thomsen was an extraordinary writer and influential expatriate who spent thirty years in Ecuador studying the culture and identifying with the people with whom he lived. Although Thomsen only wrote five books, which have been compared to the works of Thoreau and Conrad, he was an avid letter writer. His missives numbered in the multiple thousands, though according to one letter, he was only able to respond to five letters a day on his typewriter, often in the hot, humid jungle of Ecuador. And yet, despite his propensity for separating himself from the outside world—or perhaps because of his isolation—he corresponded with numerous authors, publishers, and professionals. Upon returning from one trip abroad he said he found close to 400 letters to answer. According to author Tom Miller, Thomsen was a “wicked” literary critic, “…the severity of one letter from him could often take days before its impact wore off.”
After rereading Thomsen’s best known work Living Poor recently, Paul Theroux, the “Godfather” of travel literature revealed,
 A British publisher, Eland Press in London, is reissuing Moritz's books—they just asked me if they could use my intro for nothing, and in the spirit of Moritz, I said yes. Actually I think Moritz would have had a big argument with them about money—his letters to publishers were fierce! Someday, someone has to sit down and gather all his letters and publish them in a big volume. His letters may prove to be his true masterpiece.
 
In another exchange, Theroux went on to say,
 
While the subject is riveting, and the details of peasant life vivid and unusual, Moritz himself did not really find a way to bring the people to life in “Living Poor.” His models were Hemingway and Thomas Wolfe and god-only-knows who else—big personalities. Moritz himself did not have the ego, or the style, to match them. I think his writing improved with "The Saddest Pleasure" and "The Farm..." (“The Farm on the River of Emeralds”) but in essence his writing has an epistolary feel—as though he is writing a letter to a reader; and is the reason his collected letters are probably his magnum opus. Just a thought. 
 
Theroux met Thomsen in 1976 at a talk on “Aspects of the American Novel” sponsored by our State Department at the US embassy in Quito, and according to a letter Thomsen wrote fellow author Craig Storti,  “It wasn’t  particularly impressive, but he was such a nice guy that everyone forgave him. I tried to talk him into a PC (Peace Corps) novel, but the Peace Corps is not especially news at this point.”
They met again in 1977 when Theroux was writing The Old Patagonian Express, and according to Theroux,
It was Moritz who said to me one afternoon on a Quito street, “I don’t get it, Paul. How do you write a travel book if all you do is go to parties?”

“Write about the parties?” I said. But he was dead right and I was ashamed of myself. I vowed to take the train to Guayaquil the next day.
 
Over the years they would correspond and a friendship emerged, which Theroux revealed in his introduction to The Saddest Pleasure,
 I should have declared my own interest at the outset—he is a friend of mine. I am glad he used a line of mine as a title for this book. Our friendship is, I suppose, characteristic of many he must enjoy. We met in Ecuador twice in the late seventies and have corresponded irregularly since. He goes on boasting of his ailing health, his failing fortunes, and his insignificance. For these reasons and many others, I am proud to know him. There are so few people in the world like him who are also good writers.
 
Acclaimed author Tom Miller, who would dedicate his last book in Thomsen’s memory, met Thomsen while researching The Panama Hat Trail in the early 1980s. In an article in the Washington Post he wrote:
 I saw the chain-smoking Thomsen with some frequency and formed a deep friendship that continued in extensive correspondence. When I saw him last, he was living near the Esmeraldas River, his emphysema worsening, in what was, essentially, a tree house with a typewriter, books, a phonograph and classical records. We sensed it would be our last face-to-face visit, though neither of us said so.
 
 Thomsen’s “wicked” critiques are also reflected in this letter to Miller in 1986, relating to an article Miller co-authored, “The Interstate Gourmet: Texas and the Southwest, a Restaurant Guide”:
 Last night I read the Interstate Gourmet, the perfect oxymoron; so my idea of you is changed. You are not that sweet child I knew with your honed sensibilities…You are a kind of 3rd rate Caligula, chewing, dribbling, degenerate with your debased tastes, your incessant hunger, the food going in one end, an endless stream of shit shooting out the other. I think of Tom, I think of shit—tons of it spread thick enough across the desert to bring it into bloom…I don’t think writers should write about things that don’t engage their basic passions. —And of course, studying your book-book prose, maybe, god help you, you never have. But stop Tom, before it is too late; you will not be chevere [cool] at 300 pounds.


Miller described the critique as “amusing” and went on to state, “His vicious comments are often directed not at the writer but at the person or situation profiled. Anyway, I did not object to a word of his critique.” However, in another letter he admitted, “Thomsen maintained a wide correspondence; the severity of one letter from him would often take days before its impact wore off.”
The shared friendship and respect Miller and Theroux felt for Thomsen led to what they would call “Moritz Memories,” which Miller described as,
 A tribute to a great American expatriate writer, in a century for which the term expat has little genuine meaning. Thomsen lived the word fully. We are convinced that he will be recognized as a significant 20th century figure for his life and his words. He was an uncompromising sceptic, difficult to know well, impossible to forget.  And destined to be fully appreciated only posthumously. The book will be made up of a biography, essays by those who knew him well, his correspondence…some of his line drawings, photos of him and excerpts from his three published books.
 
I came across a ten-page version of this effort from February 1997, what Miller and Theroux referred to as the “Moritz Project,” which was to have been the last phase of the venture, to be completed by the middle of that year. The plan references some of the twenty-five key authors and publishers Thomsen corresponded with.  
John Hay was one of those authors who wrote a short essay plus a prose poem about Thomsen called, “Moritz’s Dream.”  John Brandi, a well-published small press poet, who carried on a “vigorous correspondence” with Thomsen wrote, “M’s writings were those of a master seer—direct and sizzling, full of enough passions, insight and rare detail to rock me off my seat.”
 Philippe Garnier, a French journalist who was in Los Angeles for the publication Liberation, also wrote a short essay about Thomsen and eventually would be instrumental in getting Living Poor published in French. He was also asked by Miller to write an essay about Thomsen for the “Moritz Project,” which turned into an extensive article, “Maquis: Apercu, de un autre paysage American” an in-depth piece on various contemporary maverick American writers, which included an extensive section on Thomsen.
Stan Arnold, the editor of the features section of the San Francisco Chronicle which published stories from Thomsen that would become his first book, corresponded with Thomsen for many years.  Of Thomsen he said, “I’ve only known two Christians in my life. He was one of them.”
Mary Ellen Fieweger, a poet and friend, was also asked to write an essay about Thomsen for the “Moritz Project,” (also known as “Moritz Memories) which she titled,  “FAME ma non troppo.” Fieweger also lived in Ecuador and said this about her essay in a July 1996 letter to Miller,
 
 Since you’re probably sitting up there in Tucson worrying about the screed (no doubt interminable) on Moritz I’m cranking out down here in Quito, I’m sending a draft to put your fears to rest. You will note that it’s within (just) the 5,000 word/20 page limit stipulated. You will also note that I’ve treated everybody with kid gloves. Well, sort of. But I haven’t gone after anybody with brass knuckles. Though a few academics, including on anthropologist, are presented in terms they might not think altogether flattering.
 
Miller felt Fieweger knew more about Thomsen than anyone although she was not easy to get along with, so Miller asked Theroux if he would take over future interactions with her. Theroux said of her, “Mary Ellen convinced me that she is a terrific resource and that Moritz was more B. Traven than I had really grasped,” which is another reason why Thomsen’s correspondence would become such an important window into his life despite having written four books about it. After Thomsen’s death, Fieweger would become the “Literary Executive” to negotiate for his estate.
The Origins of Tom Miller’s Collection of Moritz Thomsen Letters
In February 2018, Miller contacted the editor of Peace Corps Worldwide, a blog for Returned Peace Corps Volunteer authors looking for someone willing to complete the book about Thomsen and made these comments about how and why he came across so many of Thomsen’s letters:
One night more than 35 years ago I met Moritz Thomsen, a writer and former Peace Corps Volunteer. This took place in Quito, capital of Ecuador where Thomsen had served. His account of his Peace Corps years is wonderfully detailed in Living Poor, the first of a handful of terrific nonfiction books that earned the author ranking as among the best American expat authors of the twentieth century. I describe him like this: He was a man of almost insufferable integrity and undeniable charm.
 
Over the years until his death in 1991 Thomsen befriended many writers on the literary gringo trail through the Americas as well as Peace Corps officials, local farmers, and others, building up an impressive array of acquaintances with whom he corresponded. I count myself among them, all the more fortunate in that I came to know him personally. At one point late in the twentieth century I had in mind to write a biography of him, or at least, with Paul Theroux, compile a Festschrift (literary tribute) in his honor. Neither effort reached fruition. Still, I amassed an enormous amount of material about him going back to his military service as well as letters he had written to others.
 As part of the “Moritz Project,” Miller had requested copies of Thomsen’s letters from all of the authors he knew had corresponded with Thomsen, and his best source was John and Ruth Valleau.  (This material is available for review in the University of Arizona Special Collection).

According to Miller,
 They came to my attention through an elderly woman in a retirement home in San Francisco who knew Moritz in college, who got in touch through her daughter who saw my announcement soliciting Moritz memories. She simply recalled a friend of Thomsen from college. She had enough of the name right and the city, that through the University of Oregon alumni office I was able to track down the Valleau’s.
JohnValleau was a college friend of Thomsen and shared a room. “Butch,” as Ruth called Thomsen, spent the Valleau’s wedding night in a cottage with the newlyweds, and according to Ruth,
We spent a happy and boozy evening, the three of us. And of course Moritz kissed the bride. His lips quivered as we kissed. They trembled each time I ever kissed him—then and through the ensuring years…I loved John but it was easy to be in love with Moritz, too—he was gorgeous, with incredible blue eyes and a smile that made me weak in the knees. He was witty, urbane, sensitive, and more than a little mysterious.
 
Thomsen referred to Ruth as “Panther Eyes” in his letters and after both “Butch” and “Panther Eyes” passed away, Ruth’s estate sent Miller several boxes of letters and sketches.
 
Other Literary Encounters
Thomsen told of his encounter with Eduardo Galeano, Uruguayan author of Open Veins of Latin American, in a letter to Miller in 1989:
 Did I ever tell you I met Galeano in Quito at “Libri Mundi” [a bookstore Thomsen helped set up] [I]fell to my knees before him (almost) called him “maestro” [teacher] and gave him a copy of the “Farm” [on the River of Emeralds]. He was guarded by a mancha of “pistoleros,” Quito Marxists in black leather jackets who didn’t like to see Eduardo talking to a gringo.
Although Thomsen wrote some blistering critiques of books written by fellow authors he announced his first negative review to Miller in a June 1991 letter,
“Got my first Vile and wicked review in 25 years—from the London Times. It is bitchy—and had I not written the book very similar to the review I might have written. All the English reviews are very good and…generous. Cogdon [his agent] says the River Esmeraldas book did not catch on.”
 
Clay Morgan was a fellow author who corresponded extensively with Thomsen, and told Miller the following in a letter written in April 15, 1996,
 I dedicated “Santiago” to Moritz. In fact, the “little blue man,” who appears on a rock in the middle of the river, is a humorous poke at Moritz. Moritz dedicates “The Saddest Pleasure” to my wife Barb and me.
 
I’m enclosing an essay I did for Writers Northwest, a couple of years back, so you can see if my perspective is one that will fit your book. [Miller also requested an essay about Thomsen for the “Moritz Project”]  I have many letters—I think you may be mentioned in one or two—but haven’t pulled them out to look at them since his death. Mark Lowry, a professor from Western Kentucky University, has asked for letters, too.
 
Moritz Thomsen Versus Editors and Publishers
Thomsen had a rather contentious relationship with agents and publishers, although he managed to get his first three books published. Thomsen sent his stories of life in the Peace Corps on a regular basis to the San Francisco Chronicle, despite being told they weren’t interested. Evidently they reconsidered once they received the initial stories, which were eventually compiled into his best known work, Living Poor: A Peace Corps Chronicle, published by Washington University Press in 1969.
Page Stegner, a friend and fellow Peace Corps Volunteer and author, said of Thomsen:
[He]could rise to inspired heights of eloquence in his condemnation of all agents, editors and critics (whom he regarded as a kind of literary Gestapo) who maliciously failed to appreciate or understand his work. “Of course,” he would say, subsiding in his chair, “the bastards are probably right.”   
 
Stegner would deliver the manuscript of Thomsen’s second book, The Farm on the River of Emeralds, to Don Cogdon, who would become Thomsen’s agent. When Cogdon asked for notes and asked when it would be done Thomsen sent back a 400-page manuscript with a curt note saying it would “end with a period.”  The book would become the “poor orphan”of Houghton-Mifflin publishing company, since the two executives Thomsen had worked with left their positions for other companies. This dumfounded Cogdon, who stated that Thomsen, “had brought these people [in his book] to life in a Dickensian fashion, to be both colorful and memorable.”
Cogdon did convince Vintage, a division of Random House, to produce a paperback edition. In an interview with the publisher of Peace Corps Worldwide, John Coyne, Thomsen revealed his vision for The Saddest Pleasure, “A novel? On the inside cover of the last book about going to Brazil, I told my editor I wanted to say, after the title: travel book as memoir, memoir as novel, novel as polemic.” Several author friends leaned on the editors of Graywolf Press to publish this epic journey. According to Thomsen’s agent, Don Cogdon, he was able to “place British rights” where it received a better review as, “The British have greater interest in travel memoirs then readers in the U.S.” Thomsen’s second to last book, My Two Wars, was not published until five years after his death. He corresponded with Page Stegner about the book’s focus on his hatred of his father (one of the two wars), and Page urged him to focus more on his stories as a bombardier in the Second World War, as it resembled Catch-22 in its poignancy and hilarity.
 
Thomsen’s Legacy
 
In a letter to Tom Miller, Martha Gellhorn, considered one of the great war correspondents as well as being the third wife of Ernest Hemmingway, summed up Moritz’s decision to leave a life of privilege,
Moritz Thomsen rejected wealth and all its values, starting with his very rich father; he chose to live poor, as poverty is the majority human condition. He was true in practice to his beliefs and the result, for us, is truly extraordinary writing. I had never heard of Moritz Thomsen and by chance found “Living Poor.” I was electrified by something (not found) in any writing…I think he must have been a unique human being because the quality of his writing could not be separated from his spirit. His books should survive when many others, far better known, are forgotten.
In a similar vein, Paul Theroux said the following in a letter to Miller in July of 1993, “He was an exile, a refugee, a hostage—lots of incarnations. I often think that what he was and the ways he lived his life was as important as his writing.”
According to his fellow author and confidant, Mary Ellen Fieweger, “I think he was ready to die, and determined to do it the way he had chosen to live most of his adult life. He died poor, with a disease that affects only the poor.”
Thomsen was possessed with the thought of death for many years before he actually died. According to fellow author Mark Lowry II, Moritz grew more “absolute—his cynicism, advice, softer side, and crotchety morality all more pronounced. He wrote one friend, ‘I see now that death doesn’t arrive at a certain moment with a clang and clatter. It is simply a slow leak.’” 
To another friend who was planning a visit Thomsen wrote,
I contemplate a visit from you in August with mixed emotions and wondering if I will still be alive. I’ve been talking like this for ten years and don’t die and have to apologize to my friends for lingering on. Lately, however, I don’t move around and figure seventy-five is OK. I can leave the party because it’s a f…ing drag when it takes thirty minutes to put on your socks…I  think you have never lived  as I live now, starving for human and intellectual contacts in complete isolation….Writing, the source of so much pain, I think I’ll give up. My gift to humanity—and myself...Yesterday I had more to tell you. Now, today, the mind has gone blank.
These, according to Lowry, were among his last words.  
In August of 1991 (shortly before his death), Thomsen again wrote to Page Stegner, “Page, I am half sick and will write you again in a few days. Thanks again kid, I have put you through hell, but how else does one get ahead except walking on the backs of his betters.” In 1995, Stegner and several other friends convinced Steerforth Press in South Royalton, Vermont to publish My Two Wars after they tracked down Thomsen’s only heirs, a niece and nephew, for permission. And in 2018, Thomsen’s niece and Executive Literary Agent, Mary Ellen Fieweger would finally and independently publish his last manuscript, Bad News from a Black Coast.
 
 
According to Mark Lowry II’s, “The Last Days of Moritz Thomsen”, Esther (Ramon’s divorced wife) describes Thomsen’s last words,
 Around 11:00 or 12:00 I woke to a loud thump. Don Martin was trying to get to the bed pan. The IV was in his way. He ripped it out and….”I don’t need this sh-t.” I pleaded, “Don Martin no! Please leave that alone. You need it. Let me help you.”  But he said, “I can still do something. I can go to the bathroom myself.” I told him, “if you can’t, just say so, and I’ll hold the bed pan for you.” He said, “No. I still can do it. I can take care of myself.”
 
He died on August 28, 1991 at 11:00 P.M. dying as he lived most of his adult life, staying true to his values of living amongst the poor and rejecting comforts that his father had envisioned for him.
After reading hundreds of Thomsen’s thousands of letters, I’ve learned many things about the man not revealed as intimately in his books. His letters offered an opportunity to share some of his most inner feelings and fears with people he trusted and respected and considered part of his literary family. He wrote to some of these authors for over twenty years. His letters like his books were transparent but possibly rawer and obviously unedited. They included and abundance of colorful and profane language and a good deal of irony and humor was sprinkled throughout his correspondence. He offered good advice about writing and life which is one of the reasons so many authors continued the dialogue with him, sending countless letters on their long and often endless journey into the jungles of Ecuador.
 
Although I didn’t know Thomsen and never corresponded with him, he’s the author I consider my “literary patron saint”. His transparency and lifelong commitment to live among and try to understand some of the most abandoned people in Ecuador, the different ways he described what he saw and the impact it had on countless writers is an inspiration and something worth emulating.