"In Xanadu did Kubla Khan, a stately pleasure-dome decree..." So begins Samuel Taylor Coleridge's "Kubla Khan," one of the most famous and captivating poems in the English language. It is also the starting point for this mesmerizing and wide-ranging account of Caroline Alexander's quest to experience firsthand the places that collectively inspired Coleridge's legendary poetic vision of the mythic seat of pleasure.

Driven by a lifelong fascination with this poetic masterpiece and by her limitless curiosity, Alexander brilliantly reconstructs the origins of Coleridge's haunting images as she leads us across three continents - from the windswept steppes of Inner Mongolia, where the great Khan held sway, to North Florida with its "mighty fountains," to Kashmir's mystical and holy cave of ice, to sacred "Mount Abora" in Ethiopia.

Alongside her meticulous literary detective work, Alexander offers us the richly strange histories of these places, and conveys with her unfailing eye their surpassing natural wonder. Her witty and elegant chronicles also present an amazing array of characters - from stony-faced officials upholding the great wall of Chinese bureaucracy to tough-minded Floridians battling the bureaucracy of our own federal government.

1. As Alexander reminds us, Coleridge, who composed his great work in an opium reverie, himself never actually visited the places he evoked so powerfully, but merely read about them in a diverse collection of travel and discovery narratives, which were definitively catalogued in 1927 by the renowned scholar John Livingston Lowes. The power of these works to feed the poet's imagination inspires Alexander's intriguing speculation about the value and purpose of travel writing in our own age.

Endlessly entertaining and richly informative, The Way to Xanadu is an utterly original blend of travel writing and literary scholarship.