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Title details for Marco Polo by Laurence Bergreen - Available

Marco Polo

From Venice to Xanadu

by Laurence Bergreen
Paul Boehmer
Audiobook
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As the most celebrated European to explore Asia, Marco Polo was the original global traveler and the earliest bridge between East and West. A universal icon of adventure and discovery, he has inspired six centuries of popular fascination and spurious mythology. Now, from acclaimed author Laurence Bergreen, comes the first fully authoritative biography of one of the most enchanting figures in world history. In this masterly work, Marco Polo’s incredible odyssey–along the Silk Road and through all the fantastic circumstances of his life–is chronicled in sumptuous and illuminating detail.
Drawing on original sources in more than half a dozen languages, and his own travels along Polo’s route in China and Mongolia, Bergreen explores the lingering controversies surrounding Polo’s legend, settling age-old questions and testing others for significance. Synthesizing history, biography, and travelogue, this is a timely chronicle of a man who extended the boundaries of human knowledge and imagination. Destined to be the definitive account of its subject for decades to come, Marco Polo takes us on a journey to the limits of history–and beyond.

  • Creators

  • Publisher

  • Release date

    October 23, 2007

  • Formats

    • OverDrive Listen audiobook

      • ISBN: 9781415942710
      • File size: 475030 KB
      • Duration: 16:29:38

  • Languages

    • English

  • Reviews

    • AudioFile Magazine
      Laurence Bergreen separates the myth from the man as he explores the life of the thirteenth-century explorer Marco Polo--the original global traveler. Using original sources and his own travels along Marco Polo's route, Bergreen weaves a tapestry of history, biography, travelogue, and myth. (His use of sources is complicated by the fact that the explorer wrote multiple versions of his travels and his contemporaries viewed him as a teller of tales.) Paul Boehmer narrates the story with the deliberate, carefully paced delivery of a history professor. His style is dry, but when Nicolo Polo hands his 17-year-old son over to the Mongol ruler Kublai Khan, the story hits its stride. Marco was a keen observer who delighted in sharing tales of his exotic adventures. N.E.M. (c) AudioFile 2008, Portland, Maine
    • AudioFile Magazine
      Explorer and trader Marco Polo and his relatives brought back coal, eyeglasses, and other Eastern advances to Venice. His legend further increased with a prison stay, during which he told stories of his exotic experiences with the Mongol leader Kublai Khan. Laurence Bergreen uses historical accounts to trace not just Polo's journeys, but the events taking place in the world in which the trader lived. Paul Boehmer's reading is understated, yet it suggests the views and emotions of the explorer and others who were part of his world. Boehmer creates a sense of wonder about the Mongol culture, the sort of wonder that Polo himself must have created for those who listened to his stories. J.A.S. (c) AudioFile 2008, Portland, Maine
    • Publisher's Weekly

      July 30, 2007
      Even in his own day, the famed 13th-century travel writer Marco Polo was mocked as a purveyor of tall tales—gem-encrusted clothes, nude temple dancing girls, screaming tarantulas—in his narrative of his journey to the Chinese court of the Mongol emperor Kublai Khan. In this engrossing biography, Bergreen (James Agee: A Life
      ), while allowing that “mere facts... were never enough for Marco,” finds him a roughly accurate and perceptive witness (aside from the romantic embellishments and outright fabrications concocted with his collaborator Rustichello of Pisa) who painted an influential and unusually sympathetic portrait of the much-feared Mongols. Bergreen follows Polo's disjointed commentary on everything from Chinese tax policy to asbestos manufacturing, crocodile hunting and Asian sexual mores—Polo was especially taken with the practice of sharing one's wife with passing travelers—while deftly glossing it with scholarship. Less convincing is Bergreen's attempt to add depth to Polo's “lurid taste and over-heated imagination” by portraying him as both a prophet of globalization and a “pilgrim and explorer of the spirit.” Polo's spiritual trek didn't take him very far, since he ended his days back in Venice as a greedy, litigious merchant. Still, the result is a long, strange, illuminating trip. 16 pages of photos, 3 maps.

Formats

  • OverDrive Listen audiobook

subjects

Languages

  • English

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