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In Phnom Penh, he finds smudged bootleg copies of his own books in a local bookshop and flashes his driver's license photo, waiting for the proprietor's \"gratifying\" recognition.

Theroux himself, ironically, became a prime inspiration for the nuclear age of tourism and its myriad variations in the last decades of the 20th century, all of which resulted in a booming industry - adventure travel, ecotourism, disaster tourism, magazines like Outside and Conde Nast Traveler, Lonely Planet guides, the Discovery and Travel channels, the swarming of the planet fueled by cheap tickets, Peace Corps volunteers like Theroux himself, military deployments and globalization, satellite mapping, and the ability for real-time blogging from the slopes of Everest.

There are those, for example, who would situate the origins of Western travel writing among classical authors, but a clearer case can be made for the Italian Renaissance, which produced \"The Travels of Marco Polo\" -- a continental bestseller in an era before printing presses -- and Petrarch's account of his ascent of Mt.

Robert Macfarlane reviews \"Ghost Train to the Eastern Star: On the Tracks of the Great Railway Bazaar,\" a travelogue and memoir by the writer Paul Theroux.