Word: kapuscinski
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...year-old reporter for a Warsaw youth newspaper, Ryszard Kapuscinski had never set foot outside Poland. Then, one day in 1956, his editor called him in and said he would be going to India as the paper's first foreign correspondent. Almost as an afterthought, the editor handed him "a present for the road" - a Polish translation of Herodotus' The Histories. For the next four decades, that book was the journalist's traveling companion through war, peace and journalism in Asia, Africa, Latin America and Eastern Europe. As Kapuscinski writes in the newly published English translation of Travels with Herodotus...
...Greek writer traveled throughout the known world 25 centuries ago, describing its tribes and nations in all their diversity, and chronicling their many wars with an air of humanity and sadness. Herodotus was one of the first classical writers to leave the comfort of the agora, Kapuscinski says, and thus should be viewed "as a visionary on a world scale, an imagination capable of encompassing planetary dimensions - in short, as the first globalist...
...Kapuscinski was a globalist too - and one of the most intrepid reporters since Herodotus. Before his death in January at age 74, he had been jailed 40 times, witnessed 27 coups and revolutions, survived four death sentences, contracted tuberculosis, cerebral malaria and blood poisoning, and was once doused with benzene and nearly set ablaze. "I was driving along a road from where they say no white man can come back alive," he wrote of that incident, in war-torn Nigeria. "I was driving to see if a white man could, because I had to experience everything for myself...
When he wasn't risking immolation for the Polish Press Agency, his longtime employer, Kapuscinski wrote books blending reportage, philosophical musings and novelistic grace. He remains a national hero to many in Poland, where he has been the subject of radio and TV documentaries, as well as Andrzej Wajda's 1978 feature film Rough Treatment. Salman Rushdie called his work "an astonishing blend of reportage and artistry." John le Carré hailed him as "the conjurer extraordinary of modern reportage...
DIED. Ryszard Kapuscinski, 74, stylish Polish writer whose textured, empathic coverage of Africa brought him global acclaim; of unknown causes; in Warsaw. As the lone Africa correspondent for the Polish Press Agency in the 1950s and '60s, he witnessed widespread unrest as nations began to break free from colonial rule. Among his best known books was The Emperor, which chronicled the last days of Ethiopian emperor Haile Selassie. "I wish I could convey what Africa was like," he said. "I have experienced nothing like...