"There is a sniffy school of thought that promotes the idea that the age of travel is over, and that in 1946 when Evelyn Waugh published the juiciest selections from his travel books under the title When the Going Was Good , it was to be assumed that the going wasn't good anymore. The book...

"D.H. Lawrence, in a letter written early in the last century, complained, "I feel sometimes, I shall go mad, because there is no where to go, no 'new world.'" In Tristes Tropiques (alternately—and tellingly—titled A World on the Wane ), published in 1955, Claude Levi-Strauss wrote, "There was a time when traveling brought the traveler...

"When we have been home from abroad for a week or two, and time after time, in answer to our friends' polite inquiries, we have retold our experiences, letting phrase engender phrase, until we have made quite a good story of it all; when the unusual people we encountered have, in retrospect, become fabulous and...

"What is a travel book? For me it is the story of what happened to one person in a particular place, and nothing more than that; it does not contain hotel and highway information, lists of useful phrases, statistics, or hints as to what kind of clothing is to be needed by the intending visitor....