TIMETABLE FOR TRAMPSTlbor Koeves Houghfon Mifflin ($3).
Tibor Koeves (pronounced Kovesh), a Hungarian journalist who writes in English, has been traveling most of the past 15 years. His Timetable for Tramps, purporting to be the first "textbook" on its subject, is a shrewdly organized, gracefully written set of casual essays on travel as a disease, an art, a religion. Blurred at times by a little too much literary charm, as a textbook it is suggestive rather than definitive. These faults aside, it is one of the more perceptive and engaging of "travel books."
Observing in himself and in hundreds of fellow travelers the...