Famed Polish writer and traveler Kapuscinski (The Shadow of the Sun, 2001, etc.), who died in January 2007, pays honor to antiquity’s “Father of History.”

Herodotus, the 5th-century chronicler, scarcely figured in the curriculum when Kapuscinski was going to university just after WWII. Though a Polish translation had been completed, he recalls in opening, it went unpublished throughout Josef Stalin’s remaining years, its pages full of subtle warnings that imperial overreach and the cruelty of rulers would always be avenged one day. When a Polish Herodotus finally did appear, it went into Kapuscinski’s suitcase courtesy of the newspaper editor who sent the young man, bad suit and all, off to India and China as a correspondent. As he recounts, he quickly realized that he knew nothing, that “the more words I knew, the richer, fuller, and more variegated would be the world that opened before me, and which I could capture.” Inspired by the commonsensical Herodotus, who tried to explain the world beyond their gates to his fellow Greeks, Kapuscinski embarked on a series of travels that he details in his many other books and describes, sometimes allusively, here. One episode finds him wandering through Nasserite, prohibitionist Cairo looking for a discreet place in which to pitch an empty beer bottle; another sees him alternately spied on and chanted to in China (“With each passing day I thought of the Great Wall more and more as the Great Metaphor”); still another confronts him with the curious sight of an animated Louis Armstrong playing before a stony-faced audience of Sudanese, “unable to communicate much less partake of an emotional oneness.” Throughout, Kapuscinski tests and emulates Herodotus’s methods: “he wanders, looks, talks, listens, in order that he can later note down what he learned and saw, or simply to remember better.”

Author and subject, student and mentor, are perfectly matched. Illuminating reading for any aspiring journalist or travel writer


Part autobiography, part literary criticism and part meditation, Travels with Herodotus tells the story of two intertwined journeys: the author's literal voyages across the globe, and his pursuit of Herodotus, the Greek historiographer who reported from foreign lands in the fifth century BC. The association was formed, as Kapuscinski tells it, when he left Warsaw on his first foreign assignment, to India in 1956, and his editor handed him a copy of Herodotus's Histories. True or not, it is a wonderful literary device.

And Kapuscinski brings Herodotus to life, showing again just what a superlative writer he is. He lived and worked at the juncture of two epochs: the era of written history was beginning, but the oral tradition still predominated. Rightly known as the father of historiography (he had no archives - only people), Herodotus also has a claim to be the father of travel writing, especially as he makes a lot of it up. He dilates authoritatively, for example, on a number of Indian tribes, despite the fact that he never went anywhere near the subcontinent. But Kapuscinski doesn't care about that. He is drawn to the master's philosophy of moderation, modesty and common sense. "I was quite consciously trying to learn the art of reportage," he states candidly at the outset, "and Herodotus struck me as a valuable teacher." Indeed.

As Kapuscinski immersed himself in Herodotus, he identified more and more, "emotionally and cognitively, with the world and events that he recalls. I felt more deeply about the destruction of Athens than about the latest military coup in the Sudan." The two writers make a perfect pair, separated by two and a half thousand years yet equally fascinated by the beautiful terror of the human condition.
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 Sara Wheeler  The Guardian