Sinbad the Sailor presents a retelling of the stories of the most famous adventurer from One Thousand and One Arabian Nights, with added information covering the history of the stories and the age in which they are set.

Stories say that in the age of the Caliph Haroun al-Rashid, in the port city of Basra, there lived a wealthy man named Sinbad the Sailor. Sinbad had great tales to tell, of the seven voyages on which he acquired his fortune, of the strangeness and terror he encountered along the way, of huge monsters and strange people, and of storms at sea and lands beyond the horizon.

This book retells the tales of those voyages and places them in context. It discusses not only the greater collection of stories known as One Thousand and One Arabian Nights within which Sinbad appears, but medieval Cairo where these tales were told, the historical Abbasid Dynasty which ruled Sinbad's home city, and the great Arabian voyages of exploration and trade which inspired these stories. It also looks at the modern incarnations of Sinbad that have appeared since his tales reached the West - including Sinbad as the swashbuckling hero of stage plays, stop-motion movies, and television fantasy.