Conversations with Marco Polo is a biography of Eugene Haderlie, whose extraordinary life is deeply intertwined with the 20th century: a rough-and-tumble childhood in Wyoming during the Depression; an undergraduate expedition to Baja Mexico, where he crossed paths with John Steinbeck and had his inflamed appendix taken out by a veterinarian; two years as hard-hat diver in World War II, defusing mines in the English Channel and enduring the trauma of D-Day. The conversations recorded here are akin to reading about Marco Polo: tales of every-day life and adventure from a world we can never experience firsthand