A passage from Ryszard KapuÅ›ciÅ„ski’s Travels with Herodotus, originally published in Poland in 2004 and just published in English by Knopf. In this excerpt, the author talks about what it was like to read Herodotus–or, more specifically, why one did not have the privilege of reading Herodotus–in Poland in 1951: The Herodotus manuscript arrived at the press just as Western radio stations began speaking of Stalin’s serious illness. The details were murky, but people were afraid of a new wave of terror and preferred to lie low, to risk nothing, to give no one any pretext, to wait things...


