Travels with Herodotus

Just out of university in 1955 Poland, 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. 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.--From publisher description.… (more)