Spotlight customer reviews:
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Customer Rating: 
Summary: Fast service - good book
Comment: The book, Ghost Train to the Eastern Star, is an excellent travel book. It does go even further, however, in his many conversations with the people he meets along the way. It is informative and well as entertaining.
Customer Rating: 
Summary: Return of the king
Comment: Theroux returns for a repeat encounter with the people and places that made him thirty years ago with the Great Railway Bazaar. The protagonist has aged from young turk to an itinerant king who hobnobs with luminaries such as Arthur Clark and Murakami in an 'oh by the way' manner amongst his weekly jaunts. The places have similarly 'grown up' from exotic (not always desirably so) to emerging (with increasing prosperity accompanied with a loss of innocence).
The resulting chemistry (in particular his encounter with the Indian 'outsourcing miracle') has depth, balance, introspection and even a touch of melancholy. You could argue that this is now a more serious man, a more considered view.
But in the hindsight of having made it to the book's back cover - Theroux has lost more gunslinger that he's gained sagacity. The amplitude of his insights have decreased, the observations more palatable but not as trenchantly original. Still a great read, but from a master traveler who's lost a step or two with age.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Classic Paul Theroux travel book
Comment: This book is a great read from one of the best travel writers of the past 35 years. I've read all his travel books and essays and some of his fiction. I voraciously consumed this book in a couple of weeks. If you like travel writing, give this a try. You won't be sorry.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Bliss, as he would say, sitting on a train, heading off into a foreign land
Comment: If you like Paul Theroux travel books, then you wont be disappointed - this is a great book. Read it - slowly. Enjoy!
Customer Rating:
Summary: Another Theroux classic!
Comment: As always, Paul Theroux delivers a full-color picture of the world clackety-clacking by outside his sleeper-car window. His descriptions of the locations that I have visited are spot on; and his critique of many of the isolated places he visits leaves me longing to hop on the next train.
Armchair travellers will love this book. Real travellers can bring it with them and consider it an uncensored travel guide; portraying the stunning and the seedy, the corrupt and the compassionate, the delicious and the distasteful.
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