Robert Kaplan's newest book, Mediterranean Winter: The Pleasures of History and Landscape in Tunisia, Sicily, Dalmatia, and Greece tells the story of a series of trips the author took to the Mediterranean as a struggling freelance writer. The book is part travelogue, part bibliography, and part history lesson as he weaves a travel tale across the region from past to present.

In his previous works, such as The Coming Anarchy or Warrior Politics, the longtime foreign correspondent for The Atlantic has demonstrated both an encyclopedia-like knowledge of history and a mastery of astute political analysis. This time he does the rare feat of making the history and politics leap, literally, off the pages.

Take for instance, his description of a three-hour train ride to Palermo and a stop at in Segesta's Greek Doric temple, which dates to the fifth century B.C. He begins with a painter or sculptor's description of the landscape before leading into his very first encounter with Thucydides and the Peloponnesian War. The landscape lays the groundwork for the history, and for Kaplan it was a, "history worth knowing."

Coincidentally Kaplan's first trip occurred just after the end of the Vietnam conflict offering a wonderful angle for exploring the Athenian adventure in Sicily, and a brief biography of "two of the most intriguing figures in classical history."

"Sicily's heritage," writes Kaplan. "Suggested that Vietnam was less unique than many of my generation supposed. The manifold similarities between the two debacles provided a distance from the latter one. Sicily nurtured my compassion for the American commanders in Vietnam and the civilian officials who prosecuted the war. None were a traitor like Alcibiades, but quite a few were tragic and imperfect in their judgment, like Nicias."

Kaplan captures other tales in exactly the same passionate way. Every train, bus, or boat trip into a new setting offers him a playground to explore. A typical chapter begins like this. A quick trip to Rodin's sculpture garden in Paris leads to the Greek and Roman styles that inspired him. Rodin and two thousand years of history, in turn, lead Kaplan to three books he happened upon in a New Hampshire bookshop - Gustafe Flaubert's Salammbo, Michel Zeraffa's Tunisia, and Livy's The War with Hannibal.

Like Indiana Jones leading you into dark and cobwebbed hidden passageways, these books lead Kaplan into the world of empires and ancient civilizations from Rome, to Carthage, and Byzantine and beyond. Once there are taken into the lives of the characters that lived and breathed there, Jugurtha (a classical era Osama bin Laden), St. Augustine (whose "haunting, aromatic monologues" were an outgrowth of a "tough and restrained landscape") and Ibn Khaldun (a free spirited "writer, thinker, traveler, and historian of the caliber of the Italian Renaissance"). It may sound hard to keep up with, but it isn't.