In 1956 a young Polish reporter left his country for the first time, bound for India, carrying a single book: The Histories. Fifty years later Ryszard Kapuściński wrote this one (2004), weaving his own decades in Africa and Asia with the journeys of Heródoto, and making the case that the Greek was the first of his trade: a man who traveled, asked questions, checked versions and wrote down the world. Two reporters separated by 2,400 years, reading each other.