"In Travels with a Tangerine (2004) and The Hall of a Thousand Columns (2006), Mackintosh-Smith traced much of the journey of legendary fourteenth-century explorer Ibn Battutah, whose pilgrimage to Mecca became a 30-year journey through the medieval Islamic world and beyond. With his latest selection, Mackintosh-Smith follows IB, as he calls the explorer, on the final leg of his journey. Here, we pick up the voyage in a forgotten corner of Zanzibar before departing to the Maldives, where IB became a prominent local jurist and enjoyed as many as 10 wives; then, on to Sri Lanka and Hong Kong before returning to West Africa and, finally, Andalucia. It is, as always, a fascinating voyage. Though the enigmatic, larger-than-life IB only occasionally comes into crisp focusindeed, the trip seems to raise more questions about him than it answersthe real centerpiece is, in many ways, Mackintosh-Smith himself, whose witty observations and passion for capturing the fast and tangled flow of raw reality remind us that travel is about more than just changing ones location. As the world shrinks and a virtual visit to any of the worlds most exotic places is but a quick tap of a smart phone away, fear not: travel writing is alive and well." (Booklist) Check Our Catalog
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