Travels with Herodotus
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Average rating5
15
Ratings1
Average rating5
From the renowned journalist comes this intimate account of his years in the field, traveling for the first time beyond the Iron Curtain to India, China, Ethiopia, and other exotic locales.In the 1950s, Ryszard Kapuscinski finished university in Poland and became a foreign correspondent, hoping to go abroad -- perhaps to Czechoslovakia. Instead, he was sent to India -- the first stop on a decades-long tour of the world that took Kapuscinski from Iran to El Salvador, from Angola to Armenia. Revisiting his memories of traveling the globe with a copy of Herodotus' Histories in tow, Kapuscinski describes his awakening to the intricacies and idiosyncrasies of new environments, and how the words of the Greek historiographer helped shape his own view of an increasingly globalized world. Written with supreme eloquence and a constant eye to the global undercurrents that have shaped the last half-century, Travels with Herodotus is an exceptional chronicle of one man's journey across continents.From the Trade Paperback edition.
Reviews with the most likes.
It's like history within history, a matryoshka doll of travel writing. Published in 2004, about Kapuscinski's travels in the 1950s and 60s, while reading and deliberating on Herodotus's investigations from 2000 years before that, which were often set centuries before his time. Two thumbs up!
[Complete tangent: apparently matryoshka dolls were created in the 1890s during a period of interest in “folk art” but were not actually based on anything historically Russian. They just looked “folky” and people in places like Paris had a hard-on for what they thought Russian peasant life was like. I learned this fact from a completely different book.]
