Travels of Ibn Battutah

Edited by Tim Mackintosh-Smith
December 2002
Picador / Macmillan
ISBN: 0330418793
343 pages
$22.95 paper original

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Says the London Times, "Ibn Buttutah is long overdue a wider Western audience and he couldn't enjoy a better champion than Mackintosh-Smith."

Ibn Battuta was just 21 when he set out in 1325 from his native Tangier on a pilgrimage to Mecca. He did not return to Morocco for another 29 years, traveling instead through more than 40 countries on the modern map, covering 75,000 miles and getting as far north as the Volga, as far east as China and as far south as Tanzania.

He wrote of his travels, and comes across as a superb ethnographer, biographer, anecdotal historian and occasional botanist and gastronome. With this edition by Mackintosh-Smith, Battuta's "Travels" takes place alongside other masterpieces of the travel-writing genre.

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