The author bounces back and forth between his travels and musing about Herodotus' Histories. His early travels are amusing, as he would fly into a country with no contacts, not speaking the native language (or English, at first), and letting the airport/government employees worry about what to do with him. As a Polish journalist in the 1950s, 60s, and 70s, (he died in 2007), he seemed to have a lot of time while travelling to read philosophy.

As for the 50% of the book when he writes about Herodotus, that was less interesting. Reviewers on Amazon (and I'm sure those of you who followed Polish journalism in the last 50 years) wonder why in all his previous writing he never mentioned Herodotus, yet now claims that Herodotus is his guiding light. I suppose he just has a flexible mind.

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As a travelogue, the author is fascinated by the philosophies of the places he goes rather than describing the places (his descriptions of India and China are rather bare-bones, even though he travelled extensively by rail. It's nice to find someone who believes like me that a book can be even better than travelling. "With each new title I read, I felt as if I were undertaking a new journey...recalling places I had visited and discovering new depths and aspects, fresh meanings of things which earlier I had assumed I knew. These journeys were much more multidimensional than my original one. I discovered also that these expeditions could be further prolonged, repeated, augmented by reading more books, studying maps, looking at paintings and photographs. What is more, they had a certain advantage over the actual trip -in an iconographic journey such as this, one could stop at any point, calmly observe, rewind to the previous image, etc., something for which on a real journey there is neither the time nor the chance."

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