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Reporting from such varied locations as postcolonial Africa, revolutionary Iran, the military dictatorships of Latin America and Soviet Russia, the Polish journalist and writer Ryszard Kapu?ci?ski was one of the most influential eyewitness journalists of the twentieth century. During the Cold War, he was a dauntless investigator as well as a towering literary talent, and books such as The Emperor and Travels with Herodotus founded the new genre of ‘literary reportage’. It was an achievement that brought him global renown, not to mention the uninvited attentions of the CIA. In this definitive biography, Artur Domos?awski shines a new light on the personal relationships of this intensely c...
The best of Kapuscinski's published poems, offered for the first time in English.
The master of literary reportage reflects on the West’s encounters with the non-European In this distillation of reflections accumulated from a lifetime of travel, Ryszard Kapuscinski takes a fresh look at the Western idea of the Other. Looking at this concept through the lens of his own encounters in Africa, Asia and Latin America, and considering its formative significance for his own work, Kapuscinski traces how the West has understood the non-European from classical times to the present day. He observes how in the twenty-first century we continue to treat the residents of the Global South as hostile aliens, objects of study rather than full partners sharing responsibility for the fate of humankind. In our globalised but increasingly polarised world, Kapuscinski shows how the Other remains one of the most compelling ideas of our times.
Ryszard Kapuscinski has been writing about the people of Africa throughout his career. In this study, he sets out to create an account of post-colonial Africa seen as both a whole and as a location, defying generalized explanations, and avoiding the official routes, palaces and big politics.
Shah of Shahs depicts the final years of the Shah in Iran, and is a compelling meditation on the nature of revolution and the devastating results of fear. Here, Kapuscinski describes the tyrannical monarch, who, despite his cruel oppression of the Iranian people, sees himself as the father of a nation, who can turn a backward country into a great power - a vain hope that proves a complete failure. Yet even as Iran becomes a 'behemoth of riches' and as the Shah lives like a European billionaire, its people live in a climate of fear, terrorized by the secret police. Told with intense power and feeling, Kapuscinski portrays the inevitable build-up to revolution - a cataclysmic upheaval that delivered Iran into the rule of the Ayatollah Khomeini.
Just out of university in 1955, Kapuscinski, the novice reporter, told his editor he'd like to go abroad, dreaming no farther than Czechoslovakia. Instead he was sent to India. Kapuściński gives us the non-Western world through virginal Western eyes.
'A peculiar genius with no modern equivalent, except possibly Kafka' - Jonathan Miller Regarded as a central part of Kapuscinski's work, these vivid portraits of life in the depths of Poland embody the young writer's mastery of literary reportage When the great Ryszard Kapuscinski was a young journalist in the early 1960s, he was sent to the farthest reaches of his native Poland between foreign assignments. The resulting pieces brought together in this new collection, nearly all of which are translated into English for the first time, reveal a place just as strange as the distant lands he visited. From forgotten villages to collective farms, Kapuscinski explores a Poland that is post-Stalinist but still Communist; a country on the edge of modernity. He encounters those for whom the promises of rising living standards never worked out as planned, those who would have been misfits under any political system, those tied to the land and those dreaming of escape.
'This is a very personal book, about being alone and lost'. In 1975 Kapuscinski's employers sent him to Angola to cover the civil war that had broken out after independence. For months he watched as Luanda and then the rest of the country collapsed into a civil war that was in the author's words 'sloppy, dogged and cruel'. In his account, Kapuscinski demonstrates an extraordinary capacity to describe and to explain the individual meaning of grand political abstractions.
Ryszard Kapuscinski's last book, The Soccer War -a revelation of the contemporary experience of war -- prompted John le Carre to call the author "the conjurer extraordinary of modern reportage." Now, in Imperium, Kapuscinski gives us a work of equal emotional force and evocative power: a personal, brilliantly detailed exploration of the almost unfathomably complex Soviet empire in our time. He begins with his own childhood memories of the postwar Soviet occupation of Pinsk, in what was then Poland's eastern frontier ("something dreadful and incomprehensible...in this world that I enter at seven years of age"), and takes us up to 1967, when, as a journalist just starting out, he traveled acro...
An award-winning writer and a candidate for the Nobel Prize for Literature, Ryszard Kapuściński (1932-2007) was a celebrated Polish journalist and author. Praised for the lengths to which he would go to get a story, Kapuściński gained an extraordinary knowledge of the major global events of the second half of the twentieth century and shared it with his diverse audience. The first posthumous monograph on the writer's life and work, Ryszard Kapuściński confronts the mixed reception of Kapuściński's tendency to merge the conventions of reportage with the artistry of literature. Beata Nowacka and Zygmunt Ziątek discuss the writer's accounts of the decolonization of Africa and his work ...