modern day tales of horror - murder and theft - as opposed to Thubron's telling of past Chinese horrors
compares Nairobi today to Dickens' London (186)
scorns "Tourist Africa" and "sentimental memoirists" including Hemingway (190-1)
meets a Kenyan writer, ex prisoner
on a bus he passes a town where there once lived a priest who tried to reveal the government's crimes - (200) - "Tourists would see only those lovely birds and know nothing of Father Kaiser or the dark forces in Kenya that had undone him."
*I think that is the theme here - correcting misconceptions, getting to the heart of the continent, the truth of the matter - he wants to see it for himself, but we get to see it too
history/geography of volcanoes, fault lines
the places he revisits - "the sparsely inhabited bush had become populous and visibly nasty." (201)
"I wondered...why had so little progress been made?" (202)
books on poor aid work: Graham Hancock's The Lords of Poverty, a book by Michael Maren, Sergio Polizzotti and Daniele Fanciulacci
coffin-making and happiness (204)
would I call his writing unapologetic?
I did some quick research and found Theroux wrote of traveling through China more once - and once while Thubron was there - would be interesting to compare
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