Ryszard Kapuscinski's first overseas assignment took place in the mid-1950s when he was dispatched to India. As a send-off, his editor at a small Warsaw journal gave the young reporter a copy of The Histories, a series of books by the 'Father of History', Herodotus. It is fitting then that the fifth-century Greek is the Polish correspondent's companion in his last book, which tells of Kapuscinski's earliest overseas adventures. His reason for constantly being on the move and learning about different cultures, he explains, owes much to Herodotus, who wrote The Histories 25 centuries earlier 'to prevent the traces of human events from being erased'. Kapuscinski, who was overwhelmed and disheartened by India, asks: 'How can one describe something that is ... without boundaries or end?' Ironically he does exactly that about the foreign lands he visited, including Iran and China (which he visited in 1957 as a beneficiary of Chairman Mao's One Hundred Flowers campaign). For Kapuscinski overseas reporting was almost a mission, which is not surprising considering he was Poland's only foreign correspondent during much of its communist rule.