Paul Theroux is a travel writer and novelist whose best known work, The Great Railway Bazaar, is a travelogue about a train trip from Britain through Europe, the Middle East, South Asia, and then back across Russia to his point of origin. In Ghost Train to the Eastern Star, he retraced that trip. He is also the author of A Dead Hand: A Crime in Calcutta, The Lower River, The Tao of Travel: Enlightenments from Lives on the Road, and many other books, including The Last Train to Zona Verde: My Ultimate African Safari, out this month.