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Travels with Herodotus (Vintage International) | 
 enlarge | Author: Ryszard Kapuscinski
Publisher: Vintage
Category: Book
List Price: $14.95
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Avg. Customer Rating:  18 reviews
Sales Rank: 9981
Media: Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 288
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.4
Dimensions (in): 7.9 x 5.1 x 0.7
ISBN: 1400078784
Dewey Decimal Number: 938
EAN: 9781400078783
ASIN: 1400078784
Publication Date: June 10, 2008
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Product Description
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.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 13 more reviews...
 Makes you want to read Herodotus October 7, 2008
While I read Herodotus many years ago, this book made me dust it off and reread it again. A great book for travellers, and to get you in the mood for your next adventure.
 Crossing the Border September 27, 2008
4 out of 4 found this review helpful
"We are, all of us, pilgrims who struggle along different paths toward the same destination."
- Antoine De Saint-Exupery
Ryszard Kapuscinski was Polish. He was born in Pinsk which is now Belarus ; but became one of the most famous and honored foreign correspondents. He is now deceased. For forty years, he traveled the globe from Iran to China to El Salvador to India. Like the ancient historian Herodotus, whose book The Histories was carried by Kapuscinski in all of his travels, Ryszard traveled the globe learning about the similarities and the many differences between the cultures of this planet.
Kapuscinski takes us on his journeys and through his eyes we capture his views of the new globalized world. He shows the reader how an ancient man (Herodotus, considered the Father of History) taught him with the work he published almost 2500 years ago to seek understanding first; and then to learn from the various cultures he would come across as a foreign correspondent.
Kapuscinski shares his gifted insights and observations as he remembers his past journeys; this memoir captures the essence of a very sensitive wanderer who wants to talk intimately about his travels and his life.
When Kapuscinski "crossed the border" and was allowed to travel outside of Poland, his world and his vantage point exploded into a vast number of possibilities that he had previously only dreamed about. It is my feeling that with this memoir the author wanted all of us to reach across our boundaries and our self imposed borders so we could experience more of what life has to offer. Maybe he is saying that all of us should not only look around us; but seek the unknown and wander beyond our comfort zone.
The author owed a lot to Herodotus as he traveled and this is as much a tribute to the memory of the ancient Herodotus as to the "memory of Kapuscinski".
"All memory is present."
- Novalis
Recommended.
Bentley/2008
Travels with Herodotus (Vintage International)
The Journeyman Journalist's Journeys September 25, 2008
10 out of 11 found this review helpful
Kapuscinski writes with wit and charm, or at least his translator makes him sound utterly adorable in English, a gentle observer of life who treads very lightly on places and events. For sheer reading pleasure, I have to give this book a five-star rating as an airplane book. In the end, however, I was disappointed with it; I kept expecting something... something?... that Kapuscinski never delivered, an insight into the nature of the world he traveled through, a bridge between events as such and history. What I got was a colorful traveler's tale, interspersed with excerpts from and reflections on the writings of Herodotus. There were times, it would seem, when the scenes and events described by Herodotus 2500 years ago felt more real and proximate to Kapuscinski than the scenes and events surrounding his journalistic assignments. If so, he certainly conveyed that dissociation with the present convincingly.
What Kapuscinski professes to find in Herodotus, and to admire, is a recognition of the multicultural splendor of human civilization - a tolerance of diversity based on the discovery that "we" are not as exceptional as "we" have supposed, that "we Greeks" and "we Americans" didn't invent ourselves but rather learned most of our cultural 'memes' from peoples who only now appear dissimilar to us. This is a worthwhile and important lesson for Americans especially, and if Kapuscinski's musings about Herodotus can convey it to them, he should have a Nobel... not for Literature but for Peace.
Unique travel memoir by a world citizen September 4, 2008
This modern-day Herodotus is remarkably unpretentious and his writing style is straightforward and accessible (probably one reason why Kapuscinski has been so widely translated and read). The simplicity is deceptive, though. Kapuscinski's own experience of being poor, cold, and hungry in postwar Poland allows him to empathize with people in similar conditions in other parts of the world. He describes how he and his Ethiopian driver were able to communicate almost without words. Yet he also recognizes cultural barriers that prevent a European from understanding what he sees in India and China, and that manifest themselves during a concert by Louis Armstrong in Sudan. Readers already familiar with Herodotus may not be interested in reading the quotations, and the book wanders and drifts a bit between Kapuscinski's reading of Herodotus and his own experiences, but the author's gift for observation and storytelling never fails. Reading this book is an enrichment. We come away from it with greater knowledge of the world.
socio-political reporter July 23, 2008
Kapuscinski reports on the people and political culture of the third and fourth worlds( the third being countries like Iran and the fourth countries like the Congo).
He is very humble to recognize that it is difficult if not impossible to report on a country if a reporter does not speak the foreign country language such as India and Iran.
He laments the total chaos of countries in Africa, the total anarchy !
He also made us realize through Herodotus Histories that a good reporter is more than the reporter who provides snippets of sound and images clips for immediate daily consumptions.
He forces us to realize that men in their psychological makeups are still the same as in Herodotus times.
Through the Histories of Herodotus underatand today's events.
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