Word: kapuscinski
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Sometimes he was more conjurer than chronicler. Kapuscinski's writings, especially those on his beloved Africa, have inspired torrents of objections and corrections. His first best seller, The Emperor - an impressionistic 1978 account of the last days of Ethiopia's Haile Selassie - contains dozens of factual errors and improbable characters, like the former palace employee whose sole job for 10 years was to use a satin cloth to wipe urine from the shoes of visiting dignitaries set upon by the emperor...
Still, these liberties do little to blunt the book's power as literature - or, perhaps more important, as an allegory of Kapuscinski's own communist-era Poland. Indeed, as The Emperor was going to press, the Polish government approved an extravagant flood-control program for the Vistula River; the author phoned in a new passage about a costly dam built by Selassie. "Everything is a metaphor," Kapuscinski once said. "My ambition is to find the universal...
More recently, Kapuscinski has been accused of spying for the very communists he satirized. Citing documents in the former secret police archives, Newsweek Polska reported last month that Kapuscinski agreed to pass along information to Poland's spy agency between 1967 and 1972, probably as a condition for being allowed to travel abroad. Such deals were not uncommon for Polish journalists under the Soviet-backed regime, and in one document his handlers complain that he never gave them anything of value. With Kapuscinski unavailable for comment, the spying allegations will remain a cloud over his career. But he was acutely...
...Kapuscinski's work is itself something of a library, including more than two dozen volumes of biography, reportage, memoir, poetry and photography, translated into nearly 30 languages. The Emperor was the first in a projected trilogy about dictators. The second installment, Shah of Shahs, traces the rise and fall of Iran's Mohammed Reza Pahlavi. Kapuscinski labored for years on a third volume, about Uganda's Idi Amin, but apparently could not find words for his excesses. When the Soviet Union foundered in the late 1980s, he abandoned Amin and headed for Moscow. The result, Imperium, is a perceptive travelogue...
Missing from that list are works dealing with the developed West. Kapuscinski's sympathies lay with the wretched of the earth - the patient, plodding masses of countries suffused with sunshine and suffering. He began his career at a time when former colonies in Asia and Africa were gaining their independence: a big story for a communist-bloc press agency. Besides, Poland had itself been kicked around by imperial powers, so Kapuscinski knew what it was like - as he wrote in The Shadow of the Sun - "to have nothing, to wander into the unknown and wait for history to utter...