Word: polisher
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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...
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...
...very communists he satirized. Citing documents in the former secret police archives, Newsweek Polska reported last month that Kapuscinski agreed to pass along information to Poland's spy agency between 1967 and 1972, probably as a condition for being allowed to travel abroad. Such deals were not uncommon for Polish journalists under the Soviet-backed regime, and in one document his handlers complain that he never gave them anything of value. With Kapuscinski unavailable for comment, the spying allegations will remain a cloud over his career. But he was acutely aware of his journalistic critics and, though he never confessed...
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...
RUTKA LASKIER, dubbed the Polish Anne Frank, whose Holocaust-era diary, written when she was 14, was unveiled by Israel's Holocaust museum. Laskier is believed to have been killed at Auschwitz...