Product Description
With his adventurous spirit and rich prose, Theroux has produced a vital memoir about the private life of China today, the Cultural Revolution, Mao, the thousand details of everyday life, discontent, patriotism, and the possibility of a better life in America. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (6)

Travels With Paul
Paul Theroux is one of those authors that I find myself returning to again and again over the years. Though my own days of careless travel seem to be largely behind me, it is pure pleasure reading Theroux's cynical and insightful views on foreign travel and culture and his encounters with fellow travelers and locals never fail to amuse. RIDING THE IRON ROOSTER does not disappoint.

As in all of his travel books, the most interesting and engaging character often is Theroux himself. Fussy and pretentious at times and never romantic, he is also refreshingly judgmental, while generally avoiding the chauvinism common with Western writers and travelers. Like Somerset Maugham, he is a man of the world, yet unlike Maugham, his biases and complaints are personal rather than nationalistic. We can usually identify with his trials and frustrations and share in his annoyances.

The Chinese are a curious and foreign people and I have always found them difficult to relate to and inscrutable. Theroux perfectly captures the feeling of strangeness that being amongst them evokes, though oddly enough it is the Americans and Europeans he encounters who come off seeming like the representatives of the truly alien culture. Theroux spends an entire year traversing China and immersing himself in the local culture, and by the end of the book I find myself understanding, or at least tolerating the Chinese more and the Americans less. I have found out during my own travels that the most severe form of culture shock comes from returning to your own country after a long absence.

Jeremy W. Forstadt

Fascinating
I find Paul Thoreaux to be an excellent writer, even though he seems a little pessimistic sometimes. He has way of looking beyond the glittering surface of things and telling it how he sees it. There is nothing fakeabout his work. He captures the concept and the depression of the povertyof Warsaw and Moscow wonderfully, and depicts China's issues and complaintswonderfully. He is perfect at seeing through culture and gender to the painthat lives underneath. He is a wonderful, honest writer, and so far I amloving his book. I could almost believe that I had been to some of theplaces he traveled.

Travel writing as theater review
As a reporter, Paul Theroux is a great novelist. He treats his subjects as though he's reviewing their lives as performances.I've never read such a distant account by someone who spent so much time in a place.There arelots of stories of train meals.Where are the stories of family life, ofchildren, of education, and health care?This is China from the dining carwindow, which wouldn't be so bad if it didn't go on for 400+ pages.

Maybehe doesn't write those stories because he seems contemptuous of everyone hemeets, whether Chinese or not, from his fellow travelers to dinnercompanions.Perhaps interacting with such persons distracts him from allthe magnificent books he's reading on the train (we get to find out aboutthem all, it seems).Hey, Paul, if you wanna read in peace, stay offChinese trains.

This is also a period piece, which is odd, consideringthe book is only 11 years old.I grew weary of the post-CulturalRevolution discussions, for example, and the constant references to Mao'sthoughts (Hey, I read some of the book--lookit!).With the luddite's lovefor steam engines (the Chinese stopped building them the year his book waspublished) and quill pens, Theroux seems unable to imagine a modern Chinaflexing its military muscles and engaged in the World Trade Organization. For all his accounting of Chinese history, he seems only able to grapplewith the past two decades with much authority.

This is a highlydescriptive and most unhappy account of a long and arduous journey.Ican't imagine Theroux enjoyed the work.I can't say I much did, either.

I love travelling with P. Theroux!
I do not travel much (unfortunately), except in my lazy chair, with P. Theroux. I love the way he describes the people he meets, the way he critisizes local authorities etc. He's not an xenophobic, but neverthless,stays American. He travels by train, and describes the scenery, the othertravellers, the landscape, the buislings etc.

typical egotistical american
the author went to China with a rather simple-minded purpose--to prove wrong the "we can always fool a foreigner" saying. Well, he's succeded, although i suspect anyone THAT intent on finding"prove" can succede. This book is the work of a BITTER,self-righteous man who is not only satarical and uncompromising, butappearantly proud of it too. I absolute do not recommend this book. ... Read more

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At Christmas time two orphans and their guardian search through snowbound London for their missing landlord, even though he has threatened to evict them. ... Read more

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A journey into the forbidden - the erotic, the remote, the uncharted. Slade Steadman has written one of the most famous travel books ever. But he has been unable to write anything else for thirty years. A journey downriver in a remote eastern province of Ecuador among the Secoya indians gives Steadman the experience he has been seeking - and a miracle drug. He returns tothe USA with the drug that induces temporary blindness. He is energized - able not only to write and remember, but granted an almost uncanny prescience, bordering on second sight. He is able to work again, and enjoys a period of intense creativity back home on Martha's Vineyard, where he has lived as a recluse. He finishes the book he had always dreamed of writing and becomes famous once more. But the drug he has been taking has possessed him, and it seems there is no way to reverse its blinding effects. He becomes a captive - of the woman he has been his lover, of the man who helped him in Ecuador, of the scandal surrounding his blindness. ... Read more