A portrait of the thirteenth-century explorer, adventurer, and global traveler follows Marco Polo from his youth in Venice to his journey to Asia and role in the court of Kublai Khan, to his return to Europe. Discusses his influence on the history of his era.

First published more than thirty years ago, Paul Theroux's strange, unique, and hugely entertaining railway odyssey has become a modern classic of travel literature. Here Theroux recounts his early adventures on an unusual grand continental tour. Asia's fabled trains - the Orient Express, the Khyber Pass Local, the Frontier Mail, the Golden Arrow to Kuala Lumpur, the Mandalay Express, the Trans-Siberian Express - are the stars of a journey that takes...

"Reexamining Yankee "voyages of commerce and discovery" into distant seas in the decades after the War of Independence, this book reveals how "news from the East" carried in ships logs and mariners' news reports, journals, and correspondence shaped Americans' understanding of the world as a map of dangerous and incoherent sites. Focusing on four representative arenas-the Ottoman Empire, China, India, and the Great South Sea-and drawing on recent scholarship...

"Warned by a Hong Kong fortune-teller not to risk flying for a whole year, Tiziano Terzani--a vastly experienced Asia correspondent--took what he called 'the first step into an unknown world ... It turned out to be one of the most extraordinary years I have ever spent: I was marked for death, and instead I was reborn.' Traveling by foot, boat, bus, car, and train, he visited Burma, Thailand, Laos, Cambodia, Vietnam, China, Mongolia, Japan, Indonesia,...