Oh, no: another collection in which a travel writer, who's been-there-and-done-that, dusts off his old copybooks and recycles a few choice morsels for our delectation? Well, yes. But Fresh-Air Fiend is not so much an anthology of travel writing as a journey into travel writing. Thoughtful and provocative, it casts a cool eye on its own genre, from the astute observations of the introductory chapter, `Being a Stranger', to the cogent arguments of `Memory and Creation: the View from Fifty': "travel, which is nearly always seen as an attempt to escape from the ego, is in my opinion the opposite: nothing induces concentration or stimulates memory like an alien landscape or a foreign culture": to the whimsical, though not always successful, simplicity of the final group of stories. Classic travelogues are explored and analysed: the landscapes of Graham Greene, David Henry Thoreau, Bruce Chatwin, and Roland Huntford's sensational study of the race for the South Pole, The Last Place On Earth: "when you finish it you know more about human nature." The title of one of Theroux's chapters both sums up this book and, implicitly, answers its own question: `Travel Writing: The Point Of It'.
