Ryszard Kapuscinski

The Shadow of the Sun by Ryszard Kapuscinski offers a profound and evocative portrayal of Africa, a continent often viewed through a simplistic and monolithic lens. Kapuscinski, an acclaimed Polish journalist, has journeyed to Africa since 1957, experiencing and witnessing the continent's history first-hand over decades of upheaval and change. In this remarkable blend of reportage, memoir, and travel literature,...

With a new introduction by Christopher de Bellaigue 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, capable...

Insightful and important.... A readable, timely and valuable contribution to the understanding of the revolutionary forces at work in Iran.... The reader almost becomes a participant. —The New York Times Book Review In Shah of Shahs, Kapuscinski brings a mythographer's perspective and a novelist's virtuosity to bear on the overthrow of the last Shah of Iran, one of the most...

Fifty new books at £1 each, celebrating the pioneering spirit of the Penguin Modern Classics series, from inspiring essays to groundbreaking fiction and poetry. Like rotting stakes in a forest clearing The great journalist of conflict in the Third World finds an even stranger and more exotic society in his own home of post-War Poland.

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...

In 1957, Ryszard Kapuscinski arrived in Africa to witness the beginning of the end of colonial rule as the first African correspondent of Poland's state newspaper. From the early days of independence in Ghana to the ongoing ethnic genocide in Rwanda, Kapuscinski has crisscrossed vast distances pursuing the swift, and often violent, events that followed liberation. Kapuscinski hitchhikes with caravans,...