Travels with Herodotus

It's like history within history, a matryoshka doll of travel writing. Published in 2004, about Kapuscinski's travels in the 1950s and 60s, while reading and deliberating on Herodotus's investigations from 2000 years before that, which were often set centuries before his time. Two thumbs up!

[Complete tangent: apparently matryoshka dolls were created in the 1890s during a period of interest in “folk art” but were not actually based on anything historically Russian. They just looked “folky” and people in places like Paris had a hard-on for what they thought Russian peasant life was like. I learned this fact from a completely different book.]