Read Online Travels with Herodotus Vintage International Ryszard Kapuscinski Klara Glowczewska 9781400078783 Books

Product details Series Vintage International Paperback 275 pages Publisher Vintage; Reprint edition (June 10, 2008) Language English ISBN-10 1400078784

Travels with Herodotus Vintage International Ryszard Kapuscinski Klara Glowczewska 9781400078783 Books Reviews

• This Polish journalist spent a lifetime bringing Africa to his readers. His books are personal, sharing his own particular observations and point of view with his readers. His voice is unique, episodic in nature, its rhythms and interpretations drawing me in and introducing me to a world view that I never even knew existed. I first became acquainted with his work when I read and reviewed The Shadow of the Sun in 2002 but this book goes a lot further into his own philosophies.
  
  Travels with Herodotus is his last work, completed in 2007, just before his death at the age of 74. In it, he combines his love of reporting and revisits his memories of his early travels to India and Africa with a copy of Herodotus' The Histories in his knapsack, weaving the tales of the ancient world into his own travel experiences. The result is almost magical and totally captured my imagination.
  
  On one hand, he describes his own exotic world, one that I'm a bit familiar with as it spans the past fifty years or so. But then he contrasts it with Herodotus' words from antiquity, putting his own particular spin on them by raising questions about the feelings of the people who Herodotus writes about. For example, he wonders aloud what it must have been like for the men of Babylon who knew they had to fight the Persian invaders to the death and needed to conserve food. They therefore were ordered to choose one woman in their families to act as a cook and were ordered to strangle all the other women with the exception of their mothers. This scenario as well other images of horrific battles, tortures and sacrifices are brought to life. The people of the ancient empires are made real and their constant raging of war an allegory for our own times.
  
  The book can be thought of as a series of personal essays. It put me right into the author's mind and I was right there with him though both ancient and modern battles. Once I got into it, it was hard to put it down. It gave me a unique perspective on the world and has enriched my understanding of human nature throughout the centuries. I loved the book and give it one of my highest recommendations. But be forewarned. It will be much too brutal for most readers.
• This is the title of the last chapter of this, the last book written by journalist, traveler, poet and philosopher Ryszard Kapuscinski.
  
  It is an excellent and a beautiful book, one that resonates on many levels, all at once.
  
  In 1955, Kapuscinski, an aspiring journalist in the oppressive post Stalinist environment of Cold War Poland, applied to go abroad. What he had in mind was a trip across the border to neighboring Czechoslovakia - anything farther afield seemed all but unthinkable.
  
  Instead, his editor sent him to India, and after that to China and one exotic destination after another. He took along a copy of The Histories, by Herodotus.
  
  Travels with Herodotus chronicles a lifetime of travels as the author juxtaposes his impressions of a world he could never have imagined from the confines of the closed Communist society of the fifties with the ancient explorer's first encounters with countries and cultures on the fringes of classical Greek experience.
  
  This is a deep and very well written book. Credit here must also be given to translator Klara Glowczewska for her artful rendering of the original text in English.
  
  The following snippet conveys something of the author's sensitive powers of observation along with his deft and clever description
  
  "The paintings of Confucian artists depict court scenes - a seated emperor surrounded by stiff standing bureaucrats, chiefs of palace protocol, pompous generals, meekly bowing servants. In Taoist paintings we see distant pastel landscapes, barely discernable mountain chains, luminous mists, mulberry trees, and in the foreground a slender delicate leaf of a bamboo bush, swaying in the invisible breeze."
  
  Perhaps I was particularly seduced by this book as I read much of it on the African coast overlooking the Gulf of Guinea. But I think not.
  
  It's one of those books that will just captivate you, and will take you away...