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Europe 1983 edited by Stephen Birnbaum; Houghton Mifflin; $13.95. This is the pick of the single-volume books, a guide to the bests: ski areas, tennis clubs, museums, music festivals, language schools, even flea markets. Birnbaum provides detailed sightseeing itineraries as well as separate entries on 34 major cities. Written in a brisk, chummy style, Europe 1983 is like a long chat with a peripatetic friend whose tastes you share...
...Emperor offers a trenchant portrait of a 1963 conference of African leaders in the Ethiopian capital. During a gargantuan banquet for more than 3,000 guests in the Emperor's palace, Kapuściński ventures outdoors to an area where dishwashers are throwing out leftovers from the banquet tables. A strange sound issues from the far side of the garbage dump. "I noticed that something was moving, shifting, murmuring, squishing, sighing, and smacking its lips . . . In the thick night, a crowd of barefoot beggars stood huddled together . . . I watched the crowd devour the scraps, bones, and fish...
...decade later, after a military coup had toppled Haile Selassie, Kapuściński made the last of his many trips to Addis Ababa. With the help of a former official, he set out on a series of surreptitious expeditions to uncover the deposed Emperor's courtiers and persuade them to tell him about Haile Selassie's way of life and mode of rule. They confided tales of unbounded slavishness, greed, corruption and palace intrigue...
Strangely, all Kapuściński's Ethiopian interlocutors speak in the same ironic voice; the reader will soon come to identify it as the author's own. Indeed, there are moments when Kapuściński's fugitive images of Haile Selassie seem to merge with his visions of Stalin and other Communist leaders who have inflamed the writer's political fantasies. Little wonder that when The Emperor was published in Poland in 1978, this story of an evil autocrat surrounded by craven functionaries was read as an allegory of Communist rule...
Kapuściński has neither denied nor confirmed the hidden subject of his book. But there can be little doubt that his alternately acrid and hilarious portrait of Haile Selassie's kingdom was meant to provide a riveting view of two societies, as well as an unarguable point: Kings of Kings, whether royal or Communist, are seated on the backs of the people...