Also published as: The Travels / Book of the Marvels of the World

Author: Marco Polo Year: 1298 Rank: Rating: Original Rating: Pop Rating: Genres/categories: History, Travel, Adventure, Classic, Biographies Culture: China Purchase/reserch links: Amazon Goodreads eBooks.com LibraryThing Wikipedia ISBNs: 9780140440577 0140440577

Marco Polo (1254-1329) has achieved an almost archetypal status as a traveller, and his Travels is one of the first great travel books of Western literature, outside the ancient world. The Travels recounts Polo's journey to the eastern court of Kublai Khan, the chieftain of the Mongol empire which covered the Asian continent, but which was almost unknown to Polo's contemporaries. Encompassing a twenty-four year period from 1721, Polo's account details his travels in the service of the empire, from Beijing to northern India and ends with the remarkable story of Polo's return voyage from the Chinese port of Amoy to the Persian Gulf. Alternately factual and fantastic, Polo's prose at once reveals the medieval imagination's limits, and captures the wonder of subsequent travel writers when faced with the unfamiliar, the exotic or the unknown. Similar books: Marco Polo by Laurence Bergreen The Journals of Lewis and Clark by Meriwether Lewis Two Years Before the Mast by Richard Henry Dana Jr. The Worst Journey in the World by Apsley Cherry-Garrard Skeletons on the Zahara by Dean King The White Nile by Alan Moorehead Nathaniel's Nutmeg by Giles Milton In the Heart of the Sea by Nathaniel Philbrick Endurance by Alfred Lansing The River of Doubt by Candice Millard The Lost City of Z by David Grann The Endurance by Caroline Alexander The Long Walk by Slavomir Rawicz Blue Latitudes by Tony Horwitz Shackleton's Boat Journey by Frank Worsley Captain Scott by Ranulph Fiennes In the Land of White Death by Valerian Albanov