Word: emperor
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...typical Roman history tour begins with the tomb of an ancient emperor and winds down with the works of your Renaissance-era artist-of-choice. But perched atop the Janiculum hill - with St. Peter's over the north slope, and a splendid view of ancient Rome sprawled out to the east - stands an imposing monument to a more modern and no less fascinating hero of the past. Giuseppe Garibaldi, the legendary 19th century general who helped liberate and unify what became the modern state of Italy, has a place in history that both defines and transcends Italianita. For the bicentennial...
...about rich white people is no way to make it as a novelist anymore. You're just one Fitzgerald among many. Rich black people, though --now there's a subject you can build a brand on. Stephen Carter is a Yale law professor turned novelist whose first book--The Emperor of Ocean Park, a huge best seller--confirmed what many had long suspected: that there are in fact people who are rich and black. His second novel, New England White (Knopf; 558 pages), expands on those initial findings...
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...
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...