Ocean State Libraries

The Travels of Marco Polo is unquestionably one of the world’s greatest travel books and the memoir of the West’s most famous traveler. Composed in 1298, the book describes Marco Polos travels across the entire continent of Asia and provides the only comprehensive travelogue of a European traveler in the East in the Middle Ages. In a magisterial geographical sweep, The Travels of Marco Polo traces Polos epic journey to the farthest reaches of...

This extraordinary travelogue has enthralled readers for more than seven centuries. Marco Polo's vivid descriptions of the splendid cities and people he encountered on his journey along the Silk Road through the Middle East, South Asia, and China opened a window for his Western readers onto the fascinations of the East and continued to grow in popularity over the succeeding centuries. To a contemporary audience, his colorful stories--and above all,...

In this classic memoir and travelogue, the Swedish explorer shares the story of his epic journey along the ancient Silk Road. After a childhood spent reading tales of adventure in far-off places, Sven Hedin knew by the time he was twelve years old that he wanted to be an explorer. He lived in an age when maps still contained uncharted territories and he wished to travel to these mysterious destinations. By the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries,...

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...

The features desk of an American newspaper may seem an unlikely launch pad for a journey into one of the world's most remote and dangerous regions, but for journalist Christopher Cox, it was where the story began. It would end nearly three-years later in the almost inaccessible mountain fastnesses of Shan State, Burma, as Cox brought off a journalistic coup even hard-bitten foreign correspondents might envy: a rare personal audience with General Khun...