From Publishers Weekly
"You'll have a terrible time," one diplomat tells Theroux upon discovering the prolific writer's plans to hitch a ride hundreds of miles along a desolate road to Nairobi instead of taking a plane. "You'll have some great stuff for your book." That seems to be the strategy for Theroux's extended "experience of vanishing" into the African continent, where disparate incidents reveal Theroux as well as the people he meets. At times, he goes out of his way to satisfy some perverse curmudgeonly desire to pick theological disputes with Christian missionaries. But his encounters with the natives, aid workers and occasional tourists make for rollicking entertainment, even as they offer a sobering look at the social and political chaos in which much of Africa finds itself. Theroux occasionally strays into theorizing about the underlying causes for the conditions he finds, but his cogent insights are well integrated. He doesn't shy away from the literary aspects of his tale, either, frequently invoking Conrad and Rimbaud, and dropping in at the homes of Naguib Mahfouz and Nadine Gordimer at the beginning and end of his trip. He also returns to many of the places where he lived and worked as a Peace Corps volunteer and teacher in the 1960s, locations that have cropped up in earlier novels. These visits fuel the book's ongoing obsession with his approaching 60th birthday and his insistence that he isn't old yet. As a travel guide, Theroux can both rankle and beguile, but after reading this marvelous report, readers will probably agree with the priest who observes, "Wonderful people. Terrible government. The African story."
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal
Theroux groans his way through Africa; the first single trip since The Pillars of Hercules.
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist
Theroux returns to East Africa--he taught in Uganda and Malawi in the 1960s--both because he wants to see if there is hope behind the horrific headlines and because he wants to drop off the map for a while. He discovers that in Ethiopia the ivory trade is alive and well; in Uganda, Makerere University still hasn't recovered from the despotism of Idi Amin; and in Zimbabwe, absurd land seizures continue unabated. The countries are poorer than he last saw them, while beset by the same intractable problems of corruption and violence. Most men he meets have spent time in prison. Besides frequent rumination on what it means to be a traveler, readers know they can expect a stimulating exploration of history, geography, politics, and society from Theroux, an intellectual with dirty fingernails who's expert at getting the first-person story. He can be caustic toward less-enlightened travelers who want simply to enjoy themselves, and to aid workers, whom he sees as universally self-serving. It's a shame that someone who strives so mightily to understand Africans can be so dismissive of his own people. A traveler who sympathizes with the downtrodden would do well to remember his own privileges of time, money, and education. Nonetheless, his book contains page after page of eye-opening and insightful observations. And for those of us who might squander our two weeks off on a predictable cruise, Theroux's vantage point from the dusty road is very useful indeed. Keir Graff
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Review
Still the dean of this genre, the irascible Theroux is the ideal companion for armchair travel.

Review
Still the dean of this genre, the irascible Theroux is the ideal companion for armchair travel.

Book Description
In the travel-writing tradition that made Paul Theroux"s reputation, Dark Star Safari is a rich and insightful book whose itinerary is Africa, from Cairo to Cape Town: down the Nile, through Sudan and Ethiopia, to Kenya, Uganda, and ultimately to the tip of South Africa. Going by train, dugout canoe, "chicken bus," and cattle truck, Theroux passes through some of the most beautiful — and often life-threatening — landscapes on earth.
This is travel as discovery and also, in part, a sentimental journey. Almost forty years ago, Theroux first went to Africa as a teacher in the Malawi bush. Now he stops at his old school, sees former students, revisits his African friends. He finds astonishing, devastating changes wherever he goes. "Africa is materially more decrepit than it was when I first knew it," he writes, "hungrier, poorer, less educated, more pessimistic, more corrupt, and you can"t tell the politicians from the witch doctors. Not that Africa is one place. It is an assortment of motley republics and seedy chiefdoms. I got sick, I got stranded, but I was never bored. In fact, my trip was a delight and a revelation."
Seeing firsthand what is happening across Africa, Theroux is as obsessively curious and wittily observant as always, and his readers will find themselves on an epic and enlightening journey. Dark Star Safari is one of his bravest and best books.

Inside Flap Copy
Dark Star Safari is a rich and insightful book whose itinerary is Africa, from Cairo to Cape Town: down the Nile, through Sudan and Ethiopia, to Kenya, Uganda, and ultimately to the tip of South Africa. Going by train, dugout canoe, ?chicken bus,? and cattle truck, Paul Theroux passes through some of the most beautiful ? and often life-threatening ? landscapes on earth.

This is travel as discovery and also, in part, a sentimental journey. Almost forty years ago, Theroux first went to Africa as a teacher in the Malawi bush. Now he stops at his old school, sees former students, revisits his African friends. He finds astonishing, devastating changes wherever he goes. ?Africa is materially more decrepit than it was when I first knew it,? he writes, ?hungrier, poorer, less educated, more pessimistic, more corrupt, and you can?t tell the politicians from the witch doctors.? Africa is an assortment of motley republics and seedy chiefdoms. I got sick, I got stranded, but I was never bored. In fact, my trip was a delight and a revelation.? --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

About the Author
Paul Theroux was born in Medford, Massachusetts in 1941 and published his first novel, Waldo in 1967. His subsequent novels include The Family Arsenal, Picture Palace, The Mosquito Coast, O-Zone, Millroy the Magician, My Secret History, My Other Life, and Kowloon Tong. His highly acclaimed travel books include Riding the Iron Rooster, The Great Railway Bazaar, The Old Patagonian Express, and Fresh Air Fiend. The Mosquito Coast and Dr. Slaughter have both been made into successful films. He was the guest editor of The Best American Travel Writing (Houghton Mifflin, October 2001). Theroux is a frequent contributer to magazines including Talk and Men's Journal. He divides his time between Cape Cod and the Hawaiian Islands, where he is a professional beekeeper.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
1
Lighting Out
All news out of Africa is bad. It made me want to go there, though not for
the horror, the hot spots, the massacre-and-earthquake stories you read in
the newspaper; I wanted the pleasure of being in Africa again. Feeling that
the place was so large it contained many untold tales and some hope and
comedy and sweetness, too — feeling that there was more to Africa than
misery and terror — I aimed to reinsert myself in the bundu, as we used to
call the bush, and to wander the antique hinterland. There I had lived and
worked, happily, almost forty years ago, in the heart of the greenest
continent.
To skip ahead, I am writing this a year later, just back from Africa,
having taken my long safari and been reminded that all travel is a lesson in
self-preservation. I was mistaken in so much — delayed, shot at, howled at,
and robbed. No massacres or earthquakes, but terrific heat and the roads
were terrible, the trains were derelict, forget the telephones. Exasperated
white farmers said, "It all went tits-up!" Africa is materially more decrepit
than it was when I first knew it — hungrier, poorer, less educated, more
pessimistic, more corrupt, and you can"t tell the politicians from the witch
doctors. Africans, less esteemed than ever, seemed to me the most lied-to
people on earth — manipulated by their governments, burned by foreign
experts, befooled by charities, and cheated at every turn. To be an African
leader was to be a thief, but evangelists stole people"s innocence, and self-
serving aid agencies gave them false hope, which seemed worse. In reply,
Africans dragged their feet or tried to emigrate, they begged, they pleaded,
they demanded money and gifts with a rude, weird sense of entitlement.
Not that Africa is one place. It is an assortment of motley republics and
seedy chiefdoms. I got sick, I got stranded, but I was never bored. In fact,
my trip was a delight and a revelation. Such a paragraph needs some
explanation — at least a book. This book perhaps.
As I was saying, in those old undramatic days of my school-
teaching in the bundu, folks lived their lives on bush paths at the ends of
unpaved roads of red clay, in villages of grass-roofed huts. They had a new
national flag to replace the Union Jack, they had just gotten the vote, some
had bikes, many talked about buying their first pair of shoes. They were
hopeful and so was I, a teacher living near a settlement of mud huts among
dusty trees and parched fields. The children shrieked at play; the women,
bent double — most with infants slung on their backs — hoed patches of
corn and beans; and the men sat in the shade stupefying themselves on
chibuku, the local beer, or kachasu, the local gin. That was taken for the
natural order in Africa: frolicking children, laboring women, idle men.
Now and then there was trouble: someone transfixed by a spear,
drunken brawls, political violence, goon squads wearing the ruling-party T-
shirt and raising hell. But in general the Africa I knew was sunlit and lovely,
a soft green emptiness of low, flat-topped trees and dense bush, bird
squawks, giggling kids, red roads, cracked and crusty brown cliffs that
looked newly baked, blue remembered hills, striped and spotted animals
and ones with yellow fur and fangs, and every hue of human being, from pink-
faced planters in knee socks and shorts to brown Indians to Africans with
black gleaming faces, and some people so dark they were purple. The
predominant sound of the African bush was not the trumpeting of elephants
nor the roar of lions but the coo-cooing of the turtledove.
After I left Africa, there was an eruption of news about things
going wrong, acts of God, acts of tyrants, tribal warfare and plagues, floods
and starvation, bad-tempered political commissars, and little teenage
soldiers who were hacking people. "Long sleeves?" they teased, cutting off
hands; "short sleeves" meant lopping the whole arm. One million people
died, mostly Tutsis, in the Rwanda massacres of 1994. The red African
roads remained, but they were now crowded with ragged, bundle-burdened,
fleeing refugees.
Journalists pursued them. Goaded by their editors to feed a public
hungering for proof of savagery on earth, reporters stood near starving
Africans in their last shaking fuddle and intoned on the TV news for people
gobbling snacks on their sofas and watching in horror. "And these people"
— tight close-up of a death rattle — "these are the lucky ones."
You always think, Who says so? Had something fundamental
changed since I was there? I wanted to find out. My plan was to go from
Cairo to Cape Town, top to bottom, and to see everything in between.
Now African news was as awful as the rumors. The place was
said to be desperate, unspeakable, violent, plague-ridden, starving,
hopeless, dying on its feet. And these are the lucky ones. I thought, since I
had plenty of time and nothing pressing, that I might connect the dots,
crossing borders and seeing the hinterland rather than flitting from capital to
capital, being greeted by unctuous tour guides. I had no desire to see game
parks, though I supposed at some point I would. The word "safari," in
Swahili, means "journey"; it has nothing to do with animals. Someone "on
safari" is just away and unobtainable and out of touch.
Out of touch in Africa was where I wanted to be. The wish to
disappear sends many travelers away. If you are thoroughly sick of being
kept waiting at home or at work, travel is perfect: let other people wait for a
change. Travel is a sort of revenge for having been put on hold, having to
leave messages on answering machines, not knowing your party"s
extension, being kept waiting all your working life — the homebound writer"s
irritants.Being kept waiting is the human condition.
I thought, Let other people explain where I am. I imagined the
dialogue:
"When will Paul be back?"
"We don"t know."
"Where is he?"
"We"re not sure."
"Can we get in touch with him?"
"No."
Travel in the African bush can also be a sort of revenge on cellular
phones and fax machines, on telephones and the daily paper, on the
creepier aspects of globalization that allow anyone who chooses to get his
insinuating hands on you. I desired to be unobtainable. Kurtz, sick as he is,
attempts to escape from Marlow"s riverboat, crawling on all fours like an
animal, trying to flee into the jungle. I understood that.
I was going to Africa for the best reason — in a spirit of discovery;
and for the pettiest — simply to disappear, to light out, with a suggestion of
I dare you to try and find me.
Home had become a routine, and routines make time pass
quickly. I was a sitting duck in my predictable routine: people knew when to
call me; they knew when I would be at my desk. I was in such regular touch
it was like having a job, a mode of life I hated. I was sick of being called up
and importuned, asked for favors, hit up for money. You stick around too
long and people begin to impose their own deadlines on you. "I need this by
the twenty-fifth" or "Please read this by Friday" or "Try to finish this over the
weekend" or "Let"s have a conference call on Wednesday." Call me, fax me,
e-mail me. You can get me anytime on my cell phone, here"s the number.
Being available at any time in the totally accessible world seemed
to me pure horror. It made me want to find a place that was not accessible
at all: no phones, no fax machines, not even mail delivery, the wonderful old
world of being out of touch. In other words, gone away.
All I had to do was remove myself. I loved not having to ask
permission, and in fact in my domestic life things had begun to get a little
predictable, too — Mr. Paul at home every evening when Mrs. Paul came
home from work. "I made spaghetti sauce . . . I seared some tuna . . . I"m
scrubbing some potatoes . . ."The writer in his apron, perspiring over his
béchamel sauce, always within earshot of the telephone. You have to pick
it up because it is ringing in your ear.
I wanted to drop out. People said, "Get a cell phone, use FedEx,
sign up for Hotmail, stop in at Internet cafés, visit my Web site . . ."
I said no thanks. The whole point of my leaving was to escape
this stuff, to be out of touch. The greatest justification for travel is not self-
improvement but rather performing a vanishing act, disappearing without a
trace. As Huck put it, lighting out for the territory.
Africa is one of the last great places on earth a person can vanish
into. I wanted that. Let them wait. I have been kept waiting far too many
times for far too long.
I am outta here, I told myself. The next Web site I visit will be that
of the poisonous Central African bird-eating spider.
A morbid aspect of my departure for Africa was that people began
offering condolences. Say you"re leaving for a dangerous place. Your friends
call sympathetically, as though you"ve caught a serious illness that might
prove fatal. Yet I found these messages unexpectedly stimulating, a
heartening preview of what my own demise would be like. Lots of tears! Lots
of mourners! But also, undoubtedly, many people boasting solemnly, "I told
him not to do it. I was one of the last people to talk to him."
I had gotten to Lower Egypt, and was heading south, in my usual
traveling mood: hoping for the picturesque, expecting misery, braced for the
appalling. Happiness was unthinkable, for although happiness is desirable,
it is a banal subject for travel. Therefore, Africa seemed perfect for a long
journey.

Copyright © 2003 by Paul Theroux. Reprinted by permission of Houghton
Mifflin Company.