Perhaps the greatest achievement of Bergreen’s remarkable book (beyond having finally set the record straight about the fact that Marco Pollo wasn’t the one who introduced pasta to Italy) is that it manages to convey the great effect that the decades of travel had on Marco intellectually and spiritually. There is a gradual but very distinct change in the point of view — an incremental shift in tone — that Marco expresses in the course of retelling his journey from the notes he accumulated during his twenty-four-year adventure. There is a dramatic difference between the perspectives offered by the ignorant, judgmental, seventeen-year old European Catholic boy who began the trip and those expressed years later by the broadly experienced and deeply appreciative cultural student that Marco became. The fearsome tyranny of the Great Kublai Khan was ultimately recognized as brilliant statecraft. The Buddhists whom he first describes as “idolaters” were later understood to be more spiritually disciplined and devout in many instances than the so-called Christians back home. What is first seen as the chaotic disorder of differing social norms and customs throughout the Mongolian Empire he began to see as a remarkable example of independent cultures living in relative harmony with one another. In short, Marco began to see through the eyes of the other. He went out upon the world with all the self-righteous hubris of a typical unexposed traveler, critical of all that was foreign to his sense of right and wrong according to the established rules of God, country, and polite society, and he returned as a wizened middle-age man, uniquely aware of the brilliance, ingenuity, and diversity of the wider world. While Marco never ceases to be Marco, his exposure to the cultural dynamics of the East changed his orientation forever so that when he returned home after spending the greater part of his life in China he was more Mongol than Venetian and never again truly European in his assumptions. His entire concept of the world had been altered by his experience with people and places his fellow Europeans never even knew existed. The cultural arrogance was replaced with cultivated awe, the reactionary prejudice supplanted with profound respect. Like so many of the world’s greatest travelers he had begun his journey as a harsh judge and returned from it as a humble witness. And as it is with all of those who would qualify as truly Gonzo, the stories of the world had reshaped the story of the witness and the stories of this particular witness went on to reshape the world…I think Hunter would approve. I think he would cheer the fact that one man’s delirious passion for extraordinary experience changed the world forever and I think he’d be the first to insist that Marco Polo was truly proto-Gonzo.