The Shadow of the Sun: My African Life

The Shadow of the Sun: My African Life

by Ryszard Kapuscinski (Author), Klara Glowczewska (Translator)

Synopsis

"Only with the greatest of simplifications, for the sake of convenience, can we say Africa. In reality, except as a geographical term, Africa doesn't exist". Ryszard Kapuscinski has been writing about the people of Africa throughout his career. In a study that avoids the official routes, palaces and big politics, he sets out to create an account of post-colonial Africa seen at once as a whole and as a location that wholly defies generalised explanations. It is both a sustained meditation on themosaic of peoples and practices we call 'Africa', and an impassioned attempt to come to terms with humanity itself as it struggles to escape from foreign domination, from the intoxications of freedom, from war and from politics as theft.

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More Information

Format: Big Book
Pages: 336
Edition: Standard Edition
Publisher: Penguin
Published: 28 Mar 2002

ISBN 10: 0140292624
ISBN 13: 9780140292626

Media Reviews
This harrowing, at times shattering, chronicle of 40 years of adventures in Africa finds Kapuscinski in trouble again. . . . He crushes a cobra to save his life, moves with nomads through Somalia, and waits to die from thirst beneath a truck in the Sahara. Kapuscinski alternates between plain prose and shimmering imagery, using understatement to dispel easy stereotypes about Africa and Africans, and finishing a paragraph or two of spare exposition with some dazzling revelation or note of remorse that leaves you reeling. With rare exception, these distant episodes amaze. -- Brad Wieners, Outside An astonishing piece of writing . . . as vital a book as any I've read in recent years, an outstanding introduction to the tangled threads of African culture and politics and a manual in the modes of human cruelty and redemption . . . Kapuscinski . . . may be the greatest journalist of our time. . . . Kapuscinski bears his historical baggae lightly through the African landscape, but his inability to tell the story in the dispassionate tones of an outsider is what gives this visionary book such power. -- Mark Levine, Men's Journal From the U.K.: A dazzling narrative historian, using his own experience as the principal archive. . . . he is never less than clear and pungent; his short chapter on the genocidal hatreds of Rwanda is worth a hundred newspaper features. . . . He brings the world to us as nobody else. -- Ian Jack, The Observer Kapuscinski doesn't just 'cover' Africa -- he knows it. His perspective is both vast and uniquely informed. -- Keith Wilson, Focus His book most successfully conveys the charms, frustrations, tragedies, comedies, brutalities, and kindnesses of life in Africa. . . . as an observer, and as a recorder of his observations, he is second to none. -- Anthony Daniels, Sunday Telegraph His is the first wide-ranging, elegant, aristocratic intelligence since Conrad's to bear on Africa in all its perplexity. . . . Kapuscinski is a master of the charismatic shorthand that leaves the reader knowing all there is to know, yet wanting to know more. -- Jeremy Harding, Evening Standard Both subtle and haunting, a book written with love and longing, as sharp and life-enhancing as the sun that rises on an African morning. -- Anthony Sattin, Sunday Times An elliptical picture of African life that is intellectually acute and emotionally rich. -- Will Cohu, Daily Telegraph He has given the truest, least partial, most comprehensive and vivid account of what life is like on our planet. He is an unflinching witness and an exuberant stylist. -- Geoff Dyer, The Guardian
Author Bio
Ryszard Kapuscinski was born in Poland in 1932. As a foreign correspondent for PAP, the Polish news agency, until 1981 he was an eyewitness to revolutions and civil wars in Africa, Asia and Latin America. His books include The Shadow of the Sun, The Emperor, Shah of Shahs, Another Day of Life and Travels with Herodotus. He won dozens of major literary prizes all over the world, and was made 'journalist of the century' in Poland. He died in January 2007.