Well, summer is practically here and it’s time to break out some good books for the beach/hammock weather that’s rapidly approaching. I’ve been on a lucky streak lately, book-wise - nearly every one I’ve picked up over the past month or so has been, if not a GREAT read, at least a good read. But there’s one author that’s really been a pleasure to read - Laurence Bergreen. I’ve picked up two of his titles recently and they were both fantastic reads.

Over the Edge of the World: Magellan’s Terrifying Circumnavigation of the Globe
Laurence Bergreen

Of all the books I’ve picked up lately, this one takes the cake.  Masterfully-written and richly detailed, it’s just an excellent overview of Magellan’s trip around the world.  Well, to be precise, he didn’t make it around the world (he got whacked in the Philippines when he decided to involve himself in a local squabble).  But a handful of his men did make it back, and that’s pretty darned inpressive considering the utter lack of knowledge and technology that existed at the time.

Bergreen did such a great job with this book that once I finished it, I looked him up straight away on Amazon to see what else he’d written about.  Unfortunately most of his subject matter was a big yawn to me (i.e. Al Capone, James Agee and Irving Berlin).  But he did have a relatively new(ish) book out about Marco Polo, so I resolved to pick that one up and see if it could hold a candle to Over the Edge of the World.

Marco Polo: From Venice to Xanadu
Laurence Bergreen

Ok, so Marco Polo may not have been quite as riveting as Bergreen’s book on Magellan, but this was still quite a good read.  By default, the mere fact that Polo’s journey occurred some three centuries before Magellan, in a time long before the printing press had come to Western Europe, means that Bergreen had a lot less “meat” to dig into during his research.  In fact the vast majority of material from this book comes simply from various editions of Marco Polo’s Travels, which considering how variable they are, and how many authors touched and altered them over the years, means that it’s a fairly hard task to pull fact apart from fiction.

Still, Bergreen does a great job incorporating material from other contemporary and near-contemporary sources - various Jewish, Muslim and Chinese authors who were writing about the same (or similar) events, people and places.  In all, it’s still tough to determine which parts of these accounts were real and which were not, but Bergreen does do a fair job of countering recent claims that Polo essentially fabricated the whole of his travels.  Altogether a solid read though, and I’d definitely recommend it.