Customer Rating: 
Summary: Awesome book.
Comment: Two stories in one book. One is what Kapuscinski see, second the world in Herodotus eyes. I love his book, because he gives me another perspective on live and I can learn a lot too.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Makes you want to read Herodotus
Comment: 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.
Customer Rating: 
Summary: Crossing the Border
Comment: "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)
Customer Rating:
Summary: The Journeyman Journalist's Journeys
Comment: 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.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Unique travel memoir by a world citizen
Comment: 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.
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