Rating: 
Summary: A book as one should be - in content and presentation
Review: Though after reading authors such as Edward Said I should know better, I greatly enjoyed Marco Polo's description of his travels. And I think that it is "Messer Marco's" somewhat simpleminded, straightforward, naively "Western" and "Orientalist" approach towards what he saw that makes his book so entertaining. His breathless, hyperbolic descriptions of his travels seem calculated, whether consciously or unconsciously, to give the reader a vision of a world so strange, so wonderful to the Western mind, that they could only comprehend it if they saw it for themselves. And in many ways he (and his ghostwriter) succeeds in producing that effect. His accounts of the Great Khan's feasts and huge array of riches and servants, and well as his descriptions of "strange" (usually sexual) native customs definitely strive to highlight the differences between what he sees as Eastern and Western civilization. As such, he chooses only the most spectacular and different aspects of life under the Great Khan, aspects that are not coincidentally the most exciting and interesting to read about. Of course, Marco's evaluations and interpretations of what he sees are not to be taken too seriously, but this doesn't make them any less entertaining. Marco's outdated biases and ethnocentric, simplistic interpretations of Asian life give the book an underlying comedic effect.
For pure (somewhat trashy) reading fun Marco Polo's account of his travels is a genuine success. Of course, from the standpoint of East/West relations it has more disturbing implications. However, to fully analyze Marco Polo's significance to later Western thought about China, it's implications in the general "Orientalist" framework as laid out by Said (if you believe in that sort of thing), and how his own prejudices (slavish respect of power, extreme interest in material wealth, dogmatic Christian religious ideas) colored his account is beyond my power.
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