Marco Polo

With his polished, authoritative storytelling, Laurence Bergreen makes the world of Marco Polo very pertinent. The 13th-century Italian was one of history’s great frequent travelers, away for much of his life on business trips forging trade deals with foreigners. (His longtime boss was Kublai Khan, the ruler of the Mongol Empire — not your average CEO.) Even as he notes Polo’s tendency to embroider the truth of his own stories (especially later in life, when he returned home to Venice), in Marco Polo, Bergreen admires his subject’s open-minded interest in people whose customs and beliefs were very different from his own.