Travels with Herodotus

Herodotus, the 5th century chronicler, scarcely figured in the curriculum when famed Polish writer and traveler Ryszard Kapuscinski attended university in the 1950s. After he finished college, Ryszard became a foreign correspondent who hoped 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 him from Iran to El Salvador, from Angola to Armenia. His only companion on his travels was a volume of Herodotus, a gift from his first boss. In his journey across continents, Kapuscinski discovers his life's work: to understand and describe the non-Western world in its remotest reaches, in all its variety, through his still-virginal Western eyes. Throughout his travels, the journalist tests and emulates Herodotus' methods—to wander, look, talk, and listen—so that he can later recount what he saw and learned.