Who Was Marco Polo?

Marco Polo was seventeen when he set out for China . . . and forty-one when he came back! More than seven hundred years ago, Marco Polo traveled from the medieval city of Venice to the fabled kingdom of the great Kublai Khan, seeing new sights and riches that no Westerner had ever before witnessed. But did Marco Polo experience the things he wrote about . . . or was it all made-up? Young readers are presented with the facts in this entertaining, highly readable Who Was . . . ? biography with black-and-white artwork by John O'Brien. Editorial Reviews This biography of the famed Venetian traveler is certainly accessible to young readers, with a breezy, casual style and generous illustrations. Almost every page is enhanced by black-and-white drawings depicting the people, places, things, and animals described in the text. Holub traces Marco Polo's life, from his childhood in Venice, to his travels in the Middle East and Asia, to his life in China and his return home twenty-four years later. Numerous sidebars, presented in a graphic-novel style, provide context to the available details of Marco Polo's life. In discussing Polo's book, The Travels of Marco Polo , Holub raises interesting and important questions that historians have asked for centuries about the veracity of the traveler's tales. On occasion, the author's otherwise commendable efforts to be fresh and lively produce awkward results, such as a long fragment masquerading as a sentence on the very first page—or, later in the book, assertions such as the following: "[T]he Islamic prophet Muhammad rose to heaven in Jerusalem" (without indicating that this is a belief, not a fact) or, "Even though Kublai [Khan] had murdered many people and grabbed their land, Marco thought he was a fair ruler." The book is part of the "Who Was. . .?" original paperback series. About The Author: About The Author: Joan Holub lives in Walla Walla, Washington. John O'Brien lives in Delran, New Jersey. Nancy Harrison lives in A