|
||||||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||||||
| ||||||||||||||||||
Frequently Bought Together
Product Details
|
Product Description
From Amazon
Kapuœciñski first went to Africa in 1957, a time pregnant with possibilities as one country after another declared independence from the European colonial powers. Those powers, he writes, had "crammed the approximately ten thousand kingdoms, federations, and stateless but independent tribal associations that existed on this continent in the middle of the nineteenth century within the borders of barely forty colonies." When independence came, old interethnic rivalries, long suppressed, bubbled up to the surface, and the continent was consumed in little wars of obscure origin, from caste-based massacres in Rwanda and ideological conflicts in Ethiopia to hit-and-run skirmishes among Tuaregs and Bantus on the edge of the Sahara. With independence, too, came the warlords, whose power across the continent derives from the control of food, water, and other life-and-death resources, and whose struggles among one another fuel the continent's seemingly endless civil wars. When the warlords "decide that everything worthy of plunder has been extracted," Kapuœciñski writes, wearily, they call a peace conference and are rewarded with credits and loans from the First World, which makes them richer and more powerful than ever, "because you can get significantly more from the World Bank than from your own starving kinsmen."
Constantly surprising and eye-opening, Kapuœciñski's book teaches us much about contemporary events and recent history in Africa. It is also further evidence for why he is considered to be one of the best journalists at work today. --Gregory McNamee --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
From Publishers Weekly
Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.
--This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
Tag this product(What's this?)Think of a tag as a keyword or label you consider is strongly related to this product.
Tags will help all customers organize and find favorite items. |
What Other Items Do Customers Buy After Viewing This Item?
Customer Reviews
|
Share your thoughts with other customers:
|
||||||||||||||||||||||
|
Most helpful customer reviews
5.0 out of 5 stars
Excellent book!,
This review is from: The Shadow of the Sun (Paperback)
This was an easy and quick read! The book goes beyond the typical historical and political changes in Africa, describing a little known world to the reader, a world of day to day challenges of the communities. Excellent read!
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars
Readable recollection of years spent reporting from Africa,
This review is from: The Shadow of the Sun (Hardcover)
For four decades Ryszard Kapuscinski was "Poland's most celebrated foreign correspondent", developing a specialty for reporting from violent Third World countries. He was the first, (and, for a long time, the only) Polish foreign correspondent in Africa."The Shadow of the Sun", unlike his books that each focus on one country, is a collection of non-fiction short stories from his many years all over Africa. Each chapter is a miniature portrait or vignette of some person, place, or event; some of these are historical (Samuel Doe or Idi Amin, for example), others are personal (the author's apartment in Lagos, killing a snake on a long-distance drive, visiting a village). All are written with a beautiful precision that captures both Africa's first few decades of independence (1958 - 1990) as well as Kapuscinski's reactions to Africa. Here is a first-rate author, and a very good book. It is good that Kapuscinski's stories will be available to those that do not read Polish.
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful
4.0 out of 5 stars
Unique portrait of Africa's peoples and complexities,
By
This review is from: The Shadow of the Sun (Hardcover)
Ryszard Kapuscinski is a Polish reporter who has been covering Africa since 1957. Through the years, he's written six books about his experiences. This, his latest, is a collection of essays spanning more than four decades. Each can stand alone, and yet, together they form a unique portrait of Africa, its peoples, and the writer himself. From the initial enthusiasm in the 1950s when colonial power began to wane to the destruction of that dream and war and starvation, Mr. Kapuscinski sees it all. He keeps the reader right there with him too, and we share the heat and the dryness and the insects and even the malaria and tuberculosis that attack his body.We all know that Africa is very different from the world we know, and in this book we learn just how different it is. We learn about the African's identity with his clan, we get a feeling of his sense of time and distance, and understand the joy of something as simple as a sip of water or a small shady spot under a tree. Always, there is heat, so oppressive that people walk slowly to conserve energy and do nothing but lie quietly during the hot burning heat of the day. It's the keenly observed details that bring it all to life. For example, the introduction of plastic containers for carrying water improved the lives of the people. Plastic containers are lighter and come in various sizes. Children can carry water now, thus freeing adult women from hours of work. Reading about this makes me thankful for the clean running water I take for granted. I also learned a lot about some of the raging wars. For the first time, I really understood what exactly the war was about in Rwanda and why so many people died. And his descriptions of the various governments in Liberia and the horrible in-fighting was very clear. I shuddered to read about so many murders in the places he came to know so well. And there were tears in my eyes reading about the starvation and the reasons for it. I'm deeply saddened too, because I see no easy answers. The episodic nature of the book was both its strength and its weakness. It's true that I got an excellent overview. But the chapters skipped around, from place to place and covered a span of more than forty years. I would have preferred a more in-depth look at any one area. I understand though, that his other books are more focused in this way and I look forward to reading more of his work. I also wish he had included some maps as well as a few photographs. In spite of this, however, I do recommend this book. It really did deepen my understanding of this very complex continent.
Share your thoughts with other customers: Create your own review
Want to see more reviews on this item?
|
Most recent customer reviews |
Listmania!
Look for similar items by category
- Books > History > Africa
- Books > History > Historical Study > Social History
Look for similar items by subject
Feedback
|
