Travels with Herodotus
Book Tracking
Sign up to add this book to your recommneded, reading, or planned reading list.
Book Covers
Multiple editions, click to view covers:
Currently Reading
Recommended By
Planning on Reading
Book Details
Written by Ryszard Kapuscinski.
Buy this on Amazon
($25.00)
Editorial Review (from Amazon.com)
From the master of literary reportage whose acclaimed books include Shah of Shahs, The Emperor, and The Shadow of the Sun, an intimate account of his first youthful forays beyond the Iron Curtain.
Just out of university in 1955, Kapuscinski told his editor that he’d like to go abroad. Dreaming no farther than Czechoslovakia, the young reporter found himself sent to India. Wide-eyed and captivated, he would discover in those days his life’s work—to understand and describe the world in its remotest reaches, in all its multiplicity. From the rituals of sunrise at Persepolis to the incongruity of Louis Armstrong performing before a stone-faced crowd in Khartoum, Kapuscinski gives us the non-Western world as he first saw it, through still-virginal Western eyes.
The companion on his travels: a volume of Herodotus, a gift from his first boss. Whether in China, Poland, Iran, or the Congo, it was the “father of history”—and, as Kapuscinski would realize, of globalism—who helped the young correspondent to make sense of events, to find the story where it did not obviously exist. It is this great forerunner’s spirit—both supremely worldly and innately Occidental—that would continue to whet Kapuscinski’s ravenous appetite for discovering the broader world and that has made him our own indispensable companion on any leg of that perpetual journey.
User Reviews (1) Login or create an account to write a review.
Dale Brayden thinks this book is Excellent.
Kapuscinski was a young journalist in Poland in the 1950s, with a great desire to cross a border. Not to leave Poland forever, but just to experience what it would be like to cross a border, into, say, Czechoslovakia, and then to return. He mentioned this desire to his boss, who must have been a very understanding and helpful person. The boss, knowing that Kapuscinski wanted to travel, arranged for him to be sent to China on a journalist exchange program, and gave him a draft copy of the first Polish translation of The Histories by Herodotus.
The China trip turned out to be a minor disaster, but as a result of it Kapuscinski became the de facto foreign correspondent for his magazine, and was soon sent to India for an extended tour, and later to the Middle East and to Africa.
During all of his trips, Kapuscinski brought his copy of Herodotus. Herodotus' journeys were a counterpart to his own, his inquiries into the customs and stories of other people a model and prototype for social research and reportage.
The book is a set of very short chapters, essays really, telling the author's story on his journalistic travels, and also telling Herodotus' stories, and reflecting on what sort of person Herodotus must have been like, and what it was like traveling so very far in that time 2500 years ago.
The first thing that struck me when reading The Histories was Herodotus' open-mindedness, his completely non-judgmental attitude towards the people he met and their customs. Kapuscinski also remarks on this, and it is clear from Kapuscinski's own reports of the people he meets that he has, consciously or otherwise, adopted Herodotus' attitudes. This, above all else, makes this an appealing book. Given his origin in a tightly-controlled, economically and politically devastated Poland, his ability to rise above that and to take an open and accepting attitude toward the world is remarkable.
It is not a prerequisite to read Herodotus before reading this book, but it would be helpful. If nothing else, this book might inspire you to pick up The Histories. Find a good translation and an edition with maps and your time will be well rewarded.