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| The Royal Road to Romance: Travelers' Tales Classics | 
 enlarge | Author: Richard Halliburton
Publisher: Travelers' Tales
Category: Book
List Price: $14.95
Buy New: $5.54
You Save: $9.41 (63%)
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Avg. Customer Rating:  26 reviews
Media: Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 376
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.8
Dimensions (in): 8 x 5.1 x 1
ISBN: 1885211538
Dewey Decimal Number: 910.4
UPC: 692077211535
EAN: 9781885211538
Publication Date: October 30, 2000
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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Product Description
When Richard Halliburton graduated from college, he chose adventure over a career, traveling the world with almost no money. The Royal Road to Romance chronicles what happened as a result, from a breakthrough Matterhorn ascent to being jailed for taking forbidden pictures on Gibraltar. "One of the most fascinating books of its kind ever written." - Detroit News
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| Customer Reviews: Read 21 more reviews...
 For the horizon-chaser in all of us September 28, 2008
"Name and occupation?"
"Halliburton - horizon chaser."
So self-identifies Richard Halliburton, author and protagonist of this story of glorious adventure.
One of my weaknesses as a reader is for travelogues. I read many of them, relishing the accounts of the obscure as well as the renowned. But truly, it's not my weakness so much as the genre's strength. Travel somehow turns unexceptional literary talents into Hemingways and Nabokovs; the experience of the exotic turns us all into wide-eyed children again, while simultaneously equipping us with powers of description and evocation that we never otherwise master.
I have wondered where so many great travel writers learned their craft. Having now read Halliburton, I see that his was clearly the forerunner of much of the great traveloguing of more recent decades.
Halliburton begins the story in his dorm room at Princeton, where his classmates are poring over various snooze-inducing studies. Halliburton, feeling stifled and bored, ventures outside to escape, and feels his youthful spirit calling to him in the night: "I wanted to swim in the Hellespont where Lord Byron swam, float down the Nile in a butterfly boat, make love to a pale Kashmiri maiden beside the Shalimar, dance to the castanets of Granada gypsies, commune in solitude with the moonlit Taj Mahal, hunt tigers in a Bengal jungle. . ."
And so begins an unsurpassable story of true-life adventure. Halliburton crosses the Atlantic, scales the Matterhorn, gets himself arrested on Gibraltar, wanders through the Alhambra, sleeps atop the Great Pyramid, hikes through the Himalayas, hides in the Taj Mahal at night, explores the temples of Angkor, survives a pirate attack in the South China Sea, and much more. He accomplishes all this while leading the life of a vagabond, paying his way by teaching dancing classes here, publishing articles there, sometimes not paying his way at all but rather stowing away, and charming many a new friend, sometimes of the opposite sex.
We today live in the Lonely Planet age - an age where global travel has been democratized, and there are few corners of the world that any American with a modest amount of money and a reasonable amount of determination can't easily get to. But that is not the world of Halliburton; in his time, the temples of Angkor and the Taj Mahal were fantastic conceptions that countless Americans would never witness even in a photographed image, let alone in person. Halliburton's stories thus transmit a palpable sensation of romantic adventure, fully as great as a story of space travel might today.
I would have loved this book for the travel tales alone, but what makes it a true classic in my opinion is the way that it conveys the spirit of its age - the Jazz Age. Halliburton is a high-spirited character, practically jumping from the pages of an F. Scott Fitzgerald novel. The world is his oyster. He seems to move through it without fear, with the confidence emblematic of a high-spirited young America, prosperous, bemused, flexing its muscles and stretching its legs.
Even better, the book is written in a classic old sensational journalist's style, now long extinct. It rather reminded me of the writing of his contemporary Robert Ripley. They are each writers who brought the wonders of the world to the kitchen tables of Americans, splendors to be digested in the comfort of home along with their morning coffee and eggs. At a time when cinema did not yet have sound, and television did not yet exist, it's compelling to reflect on how wondrous all these stories must have seemed. This book is thus not just a travelogue, but a cultural document. I personally love the persistent tone of exhilaration and wonder, which contrasts with the jaded cynicism of so many journalists today.
There is, it must be said, a downside. Halliburton has an aspect of his personality that can only be accurately described as racist. He tells a story early on of competing with some fellow travelers in a rickshaw race, in which they find it amusing to beat their Chinese drivers to compel them to go faster. I had written that one off as a disturbing fabrication on his part, but later there were too many examples of clear racism for me to ignore. Halliburton thinks he is above riding in coach class with Indians or Japanese - even when he himself is a stowaway! At one point he strikes an Indian train conductor simply for doing his job, and tells the story later with pride rather than shame. This book will definitely help the modern reader to understand why much of the world came to resent the prosperous westerner. There is certainly some "Ugly American" in here.
So, to enjoy this book, you must be willing to compartmentalize. If you are like me, you will find it 95% fascinating, 5% deplorable. You need to be comfortable with the best aspects of the American character of the 1920s co-existing with some awful ones. If you aren't able to look past these elements, you might find yourself turning against the author and his book about two-thirds through.
Count me in the camp that loves it. I felt nine years old again while reading it, dreaming of every adventure I someday wanted to have. A window not only into the exotic travel adventures still available in the 1920s, but also into the psyche of 1920s America, and into the styling of then-popular writing. Long live the vagabond!
Great Travel Books: The Royal Road to Romance September 23, 2007
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
Great Travel Books: The Royal Road to Romance
Meknes, Morocco
September 22, 2007
Homepage: Cancion del Vagabundo, http://canciondelvagabundo.googlepages.com
Great Travel Books page: http://canciondelvagabundo.googlepages.com/greattravelbooks
"The Vagabond life is the logical life to lead if one seeks the intimate knowledge of the world we were seeking."
-Richard Halliburton, Royal Road to Romance
The Royal Road to Romance was the first work of the adventurous, horizon chasing romantic, Richard Halliburton. It, essentially, is an account of a Walkabout around the world that he undertook around 1926 and later wrote down in a New Jersey mental institution. It seems evident to me that Halliburton read (and probably reread) Harry Franck's A Vagabond Journey Around the World and was deeply influenced by it. Everything from Halliburton's route, his travelling style, to his somewhat unsteady use of vagabond slang echos Harry Franck's monumental work. But this is not meant as a slight to Halliburton, as any wanderer, myself included, who has read Vagabond Journey has the spirit of the book forever etched into their very psyches. The Royal Road to Romance is completely able to stand on its own two feet, as it takes travel writing into a completely new direction- the direction of Romance.
At the onset of the story, Halliburton explains the impetus behind his journey by reciting Dorian Grey's ominous warning:
"Realize your youth while you have it. Don't squander the gold of your days, listening to the tedious, or giving your life away to the ignorant and the common. These are the sickly aims, the false ideals, of our age. "Live " live the wonderful life that is in you. Be afraid of nothing. There is such a little time that your youth will last- such a little time."
Halliburton continues by exclaiming:
"The romantic- that was what I wanted. I hungered for the romance of the sea, and foreign ports, and foreign smiles. I wanted to follow the prow of a ship, any ship, and sail away, perhaps to China, perhaps to Spain, perhaps to the South Sea Isles, there to do nothing all day but lie on a surf-swept beach and fling monkeys at the coconuts.
The Royal Road to Romance is just that: the story of one man's search for the Romance of life- not the romance of women, but the Romance of the pure, essential underpinnings of the human spirit and the quest for pure substance. In this search, Halliburton turns to the Open Road and lives out the ingrained human urge to travel, to seek out adventure, to find out what is on the other side of the hill, and to embrace everything that is joyous, exciting, and essential. Royal Road is a declaration of the base impulse that is the impetus of every journey: the Wanderlust. It also shows us the reasons why we need to travel and what happens when you throw all discretion to the wind and fully embrace the Open Road and providence.
In these journeys, Halliburton becomes a sailor, frolics with French actresses, has tea with the president of Andorra, gets arrested for photographing the prison at Gibralter, sleeps on top of an Egyptian pyramid, spends a night hiding inside the Taj Mahal, steals rides on Indian trains, visits Kashmir, is almost killed by a cobra in Thailand, is robbed by pirates in Hong Kong, sneaks into Siberia, and sends his lucky tiger tooth to the Empress of China immediately prior to her banishment.
"I suppose she never received the tooth," he wrote.
The Royal Road to Romance is a story about running life to the very edge just to feel its gentle touch. It is Hallibuton's approach towards living that really makes this book special. He places the substance with which we fill our days above any abstract notion of wealth and prestige.
It is the kind of book that has the power to change someone's life, as Halliburton's message is actually very simple:
"Let those who wish have their respectability- I wanted freedom, freedom to indulge in whatever caprice struck my fancy, freedom to search in the farthermost corners of the earth for the beautiful, the joyous, and the romantic."
The Royal Road to Romance is a truly beautiful expression of the joy of the Open Road and adventure for its own sake. It is an ecstatic cry to jolt us into action so that we do not let another day slip by without living it to its fullest.
"Sun and wind and beat of sea,
Great lands stretching endlessly.
Where be the bonds to bind the free?
All the world was made for me."
 Ugly American March 22, 2005
6 out of 12 found this review helpful
A hard to evaluate book. In some respects it is great fun. The author, a recent college graduate, goes through a series of adventures that are often outrageous, or impossible in today's world. They reflect a different world when national borders were maybe a little less gaurded and tourism less a worldwide force.
I'm not at all one to insist on "political correctness" or to judge people 80 years ago by current moral standards. At the same time, the author could be insufferably boorish, and the constant racism and stereotyping grates. His description of Asians, rather than being full of keen insight, is mostly limited to stating their respective civility. A horiffic piracy attack is hampered by the author's utter lack of concern or sympathy with the brutally and suddenly murdered Chinese victims, and he instead prattles on about his watch, and concocts an explanation how the white people could have stopped the piracy had they really tried. Even if it accurately reflected the author's concerns, it isn't what you read travel books for.
As the author himself says, this isn't quite a travel book, and as a lot of the attraction to the book is whether you find the narrator sympathetic, this boorishness is no minor failing. Coupled with the brevity of each described scene, and the wildly overblown prose, the book has a certain repetitiveness to it.
Other authors published under the Traveller's Tales Classic Series may have been a little less adventurous but were much more insightful in their observation and more in-depth in their exploration of each nations. I'd recommend Isabella Bird's books before this one.
Fifty years and this book still sticks with me August 17, 2004
10 out of 10 found this review helpful
As a child in Paris in the early 50's it was tough finding English-language books to read. Now and then my Dad would take me to a small library at the American embassy to check out books, and it was there he urged me to read Richard Halliburton. In my mind's eye I can still see that big thick book and the photo of Halliburton in front of the Taj Mahal.
Hardly anyone knows his name today, but in the 1930's Halliburton's name was well-known and his travel/adventure books were best sellers. My dad had read them in the depths of the Depression and they'd engendered in him a thirst for travel, which he fulfilled many times over with a career in the airline industry.
I guess the same thing happened to me when I read "The Royal Road to Romance" around 1952 and was permanently bitten by the travel bug. I was surfing around the net tonight and ran across a story on Richard Halliburton and thought I'd check to see if any of his books were still in print. I was quite surprised to see they are and people are still reading him.
Give this book to a kid with dreams, or read it yourself. Any book that sticks with you for 52 years has got to be very special.
Fantastic Read April 3, 2004
4 out of 4 found this review helpful
I am nearing the end of the book and Loving it!
I purchased the book after hearing aobut Richard Halliburton on "Writer's Almanac" on NPR. This is such a wonderful and witty book that I am looking forward to sharing it with my friends and family so we can discuss it.
I recommend it to anyone that wants to get a feeling of what it was really like to travel the world as a vagabond prior to WWII.
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