31.00 NIS
SKU: 9780140292626
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Myszard Kapuscinski
Polish writer and foreign correspondent Ryszard Kapuscinski spent more than forty years reporting from around the world, and The Shadow of the Sun may well be the peak of his extraordinary career. This book, an alternative record of his time in Africa and its overwhelming heat and intensity, shows why so many agree with Michael Ignatieff’s view that Kapuscinski transformed reportage into literature.
Shaped by a difficult wartime childhood, he was drawn to the developing world and arrived in Ghana in 1957, just as colonial Africa was beginning to break apart. He witnessed firsthand the turbulent years that followed, when newly independent nations emerged, often becoming vulnerable to exploitation by dictators. From the blinding light of Accra airport on his first arrival to the quiet Tanzanian night that closes the book, he travels across savannah, desert and city by foot, road and train, always searching for Africa’s most precious and elusive comforts: shade and water.
Along the way he survives an Egyptian cobra, battles cerebral malaria and tuberculosis, and endures cockroaches “the size of small turtles.” His 29 short chapters blend immediacy with reflection, weaving history and personal experience across Ethiopia, Uganda, Nigeria, Sudan, Liberia and more.
While he recognizes the damage caused by European colonialism, he avoids writing from a place of guilt. The book recalls the atmospheric style of Gianni Celati’s Adventures in Africa, capable of holding both the tragedy of Rwanda and the tiny Ngubi beetle, which labors in the desert just to produce the moisture it needs to live. Kapuscinski pays as much attention to a plastic water container as to a warlord, and finds more meaning in an African shantytown than in a Manhattan skyscraper.
What he describes, as the author of Shah of Shahs, is not “Africa” as a single entity, which he insists exists only on a map, but a distilled portrait of life itself: its faith, its trees, its overwhelming youthfulness, its armies that rise and fall in a day, and its sun that “curdles the blood.”
Planned as the first part of a trilogy on Africa, Central America and Asia, The Shadow of the Sun is a powerful and humbling work — a blend of imagination, honesty, and lived experience from a writer determined to draw truth out of fact.
March 28, 2002 by Penguin Books
Tags:
2002,
African & African American,
All Products,
Contemporary,
Myszard Kapuscinski
