The Pillars of Hercules:  A Grand Tour of the Mediterranean
Paul Theroux (1995)

THE A5 BOOK REVIEW

The Pillars of Hercules is a travelogue by Paul Theroux describing a long and wide-ranging tour he made around the Mediterranean in 1993-1994.  Generally Theroux travels to exotic locales rarely explored by Westerners, so writing about a much more popular destination made for a bit of a different challenge.  The acerbic and perceptive style however is still pure Theroux, with rich detail, unquenchable curiosity, and numerous interactions with the waiters, villagers, shopkeepers and other random local people he meets along the way.   He starts at one of the pillars in Gibraltar, ultimately returning to the other pillar in Ceuta, in Morocco, eighteen months later.  He travels by boat, train and bus, sticking close to the ocean generally, making his way through Spain, the French Riviera, Corsica, Sardinia, Sicily, the Greek Islands, Albania, war-torn Croatia, Turkey, Syria, Israel, Egypt, and then Morocco.  We don’t recommend this book as an introduction to Theroux, but it is a good read for Theroux fans and for those planning to make their own trip to the Mediterranean.
Click here to see reviews and prices for this book.

A FEW OTHER A5 RECOMMENDED TRAVEL BOOKS FROM PAUL THEROUX  (click here for more)
Paul Theroux is one of the world's most prominent travel writers, and one who deserves credit for shaping and defining the genre.  We at A5 Travel Books love his rich description of people and settings, his wit and his intelligence.  He has written numerous travel essays and works of fiction, several of which were turned into movies.  See more from Paul Theroux here.

GREAT QUOTES:

"There was a time when I wanted to see only wild places, and was reluctant to go to place that had been written about extensively.  But then - it is so funny about travel - I would go to a place that everyone had written about and it was as though I was seeing something entirely new.  I felt that when I was writing about Britain.  My Britain was different from anything I have read.  It made the going good because I was unprepared for what I saw.  That was always the best part of travel, the sense of discovery. When there was none and it was all predictable I wanted to go home."
- Paul Theroux, The Pillars of Hercules

INTERESTING LINKS:

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  • Read" Bored Among the Ruins", the New York Times review, by Stephen Greenblatt on The Pillars of Hercules.
  • According to Plato, the lost island of Atlantis was located somewhere beyond the Pillars of Hercules, placing it in the realm of the Unknown,  Mark Adams explores this and other theories of the location of Atlantis in his book, another A5 recommendation, Meet Me in Atlantis: Across Three Continents in Search of the Sunken City.
  • ​The image on the right is a modern conjectural depiction of the Pillars of Hercules from the lost western section of a famous 13th century Roman map called the  Tabula Peutingeriana.  Click here to learn more about this map at Wikipedia.  Photo Credit: By Anonymous, compiled by Conradi Millieri (1887/1888) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.