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The Other

The master of literary reportage reflects on the West's encounters with the non-European throughout the ages.
Ryszard Kapuscinski witnessed and reported major wars, coups and revolutions as they happened throughout the developing world and global South. In this distillation of his reflections accumulated from a lifetime of travel, he takes a fresh look at the Western idea of the Other: the non-European or non-American. 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 Other from classical times to colonialism, from the age of enlightenment to the postmodern global village. He observes how today we continue to treat the non-European as an alien and a threat, an object of study that has not yet become a partner in sharing responsibility for the fate of the world. In our globalised but increasingly polarised post-9/11 age, Kapuscinski shows how the Other remains one of the most compelling ideas of our times.

Travels With Herodotus

From the master of literary reportage whose acclaimed books include "Shah of Shahs, The Emperor," and "The Shadow of the Sun," an intimate account of his first youthful forays beyond the Iron Curtain. Just out of university in 1955, Kapuscinski told his editor that he? d like to go abroad. Dreaming no farther than Czechoslovakia, the young reporter found himself sent to India. Wide-eyed and captivated, he would discover in those days his life? s work? to understand and describe the world in its remotest reaches, in all its multiplicity. From the rituals of sunrise at Persepolis to the incongruity of Louis Armstrong performing before a stone-faced crowd in Khartoum, Kapuscinski gives us the non-Western world as he first saw it, through still-virginal Western eyes. The companion on his travels: a volume of Herodotus, a gift from his first boss. Whether in China, Poland, Iran, or the Congo, it was the ? father of history? ? and, as Kapuscinski would realize, of globalism? who helped the young correspondent to make sense of events, to find the story where it did not obviously exist. It is this great forerunner? s spirit? both supremely worldly and innately Occidental? that would continue to whet Kapuscinski? s ravenous appetite for discovering the broader world and that has made him our own indispensable companion on any leg of that perpetual journey.

Another Day of Life

In 1975, Angola was tumbling into pandemonium; everyone who could was packing crates, desperate to abandon the beleaguered colony. With his trademark bravura, Ryszard Kapuscinski went the other way, begging his was from Lisbon and comfort to Luanda-once famed as Africa''s Rio de Janeiro-and chaos.

Angola, a slave colony later given over to mining and plantations, was a promised land for generations of poor Portuguese. It had belonged to Portugal since before there were English-speakers in North America. After the collapse of the fascist dictatorship in Portugal in 1974, Angola was brusquely cut loose, spurring the catastrophe of a still-ongoing civil war. Kapuscinski plunged right into the middle of the drama, driving past thousands of haphazardly placed check-points, where using the wrong shibboleth was a matter of life and death; recording his imporessions of the young soldiers-from Cuba, Angola, South Africa, Portugal-fighting a nebulous war with global repercussions; and examining the peculiar brutality of a country surprised and divided by its newfound freedom.

Translated from the Polish by William R. Brand and Katarzyna Mroczkowska-Brand.

Cet autre

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The I Wrote Stone

Ryszard Kapuscinski is considered among the most important journalists of the 20th century, with several of his titles, including The Soccer War, The Shah of Shahs, Imperium and The Shadow of the Sun considered part of the modern canon. His reportages bore the marks of the highest literary craftsmanship characterized by sophisticated narrative technique, psychological portraits of characters, a wealth of stylization, metaphor and unusual imagery that serves as means of interpreting the perceived world. He approached foreign countries first through literature, spending months reading before each trip. He was frequently mentioned as a favourite to win the Nobel Prize for Literature, though remained overlooked when he died in January, 2007. What was not known in the English speaking world, however, was the Ryszard Kapuscinski was also a poet. Ecce Homo brings together the best of the poems from his two previously published collections, offering them in English in book form for the first time. Kapuscinskis is a thoughtful, philosophic verse, often aphoristic in tone and structure, and as one would expect, engaged politically, morally and viscerally with the world around him.

Imperium

Imperium tells the story of the collapse of the Soviet Union as it has never before been told. This stunning narrative draws on personal experience, historical insight and penetrating reporting to bring to life the people and culture of the Soviet Union.

Travels With Herodotus

From the renowned journalist comes this intimate account of his years in the field, traveling for the first time beyond the Iron Curtain to India, China, Ethiopia, and other exotic locales.

In the 1950s, Ryszard Kapuscinski finished university in Poland and became a foreign correspondent, hoping to go abroad - perhaps to Czechoslovakia. Instead, he was sent to India - the first stop on a decades-long tour of the world that took Kapuscinski from Iran to El Salvador, from Angola to Armenia. Revisiting his memories of traveling the globe with a copy of Herodotus'' Histories in tow, Kapuscinski describes his awakening to the intricacies and idiosyncrasies of new environments, and how the words of the Greek historiographer helped shape his own view of an increasingly globalized world. Written with supreme eloquence and a constant eye to the global undercurrents that have shaped the last half-century, Travels with Herodotus is an exceptional chronicle of one man''s journey across continents.

MES VOYAGES AVEC HERODOTE

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AUTOPORTRAIT D'UN REPORTER

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