Fifteen years of work as a writer for magazines in Texas and New York offered Richard West a literary canvas that he painted with style, patience, and skill. He took on several time-consuming assignments that focused on the hopes and fears of Texas's poor and middle class. But his engaging reportorial style worked equally well when he quietly gauged the cachet of power at an exclusive New York City restaurant. His astute observations of people and their interactions with the places where they live, work, and wander served West well as he evolved into a freelance travel writer. West is unique among literary journalists for his unrequited love of travel literature. His personal library of five or six hundred travel-related volumes leans more toward authors such as Paul Theroux and Colin Thubron, who write as much about internal journeys as external odysseys, than toward the failed poets of...