Word: kapuscinski
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...Ryszard Kapuscinski was considered to be one of the most fearless journalists of his time. As the only foreign correspondent for PAP, the Polish news agency, in the 1960s and '70s, he covered some 27 coups and revolutions around the world, survived firing squads in Africa and befriended the likes of Che Guevara. His reporting formed the basis for widely acclaimed books such as The Emperor, about the life of the eccentric Ethiopian leader Haile Selassie; Shah of Shahs, about the fall of the Iranian ruler Reza Pahlavi; and Imperium, on the last days of the Soviet Union. Salman Rushdie...
...three years after Kapuscinski's death at the age of 74, fresh questions have emerged about whether the journalist's works were based more in fiction than in fact, causing a firestorm in Poland, where Kapuscinski is considered a national hero. In a new 600-page biography titled Kapuscinski Non-Fiction, the Polish journalist Artur Domoslawski says Kapuscinski repeatedly crossed the boundary between reporting and fiction writing during his career, claiming to have witnessed events where he hadn't actually been present and inventing images to heighten the dramatic effect of his stories. (See the top 10 fiction books...
That may be why he found Herodotus good company. Travels is actually two interwoven stories: Kapuscinski's account of working in India, China, Egypt, Sudan, Congo and Ethiopia; and Herodotus' colorful observations on customs and conflicts in the equally exotic lands he visited. (Like Kapuscinski, he was accused of exaggerating for effect.) From Herodotus, Kapuscinski says he learned that "each culture requires acceptance and understanding, and that to understand it one must first come to know...
...Greek's main subject is the costly, misguided 5th century B.C. war in which invading Persian forces were eventually repulsed by a united Athens and Sparta. Kapuscinski gets hooked by his ancient predecessor's storytelling skills. "As I immersed myself increasingly in Herodotus' book, I identified more and more, emotionally and cognitively, with the world and events that he recalls," writes Kapuscinski. "I felt more deeply about the destruction of Athens than about the latest military coup in the Sudan, and the sinking of the Persian fleet struck me as more tragic than yet another mutiny of troops in Congo...
...Kapuscinski, who suffered from cancer for many years, ran out of time before he could write a long-envisioned book on his Polish homeland. But from the apartment he and his pediatrician wife Alicja shared in a working-class district of Warsaw, he pounded out articles and gave interviews right up to his final hospitalization. In contrast to Kapuscinski's astounding output, Herodotus left only The Histories. In its opening passage, the ancient scribbler declares that his purpose in writing - stunningly ambitious for the era - is "to prevent the traces of human events from being erased by time." The Histories...