Imperium - Softcover

Kapuscinski, Ryszard

Softcover

ISBN 10: 067974780X ISBN 13: 9780679747802

Publisher: Vintage, 1995

Synopsis

The Polish journalist whose The Soccer War and The Emperor are counted as classics of contemporary reportage now bears witness in Imperium to the disintegration of the Soviet Union. This magisterial book combines childhood memory with unblinking journalism, a radar for the truth with a keen appreciation of the absurd.

Imperium begins with Ryszard Kapuscinski's account of the Soviet occupation of his town in eastern Poland in 1939. It culminates fifty years later, with a forty-thousand-mile journey that takes him from the haunted corridors of the Kremlin to the abandoned gulag of Kolyma, from a miners' strike in the arctic circle to a panic-stricken bus ride through the war-torn Caucasus.

Out of passivity and paranoia, ethnic hatred and religious fanaticism that have riven two generations of Eastern Europeans, Kapuscinski has composed a symphony for a collapsing empire—a work that translates history into the hopes and sufferings of the human beings condemned to live it.

About this title

From the Publisher:

"A compelling and convincing narrative that examines the extensive damage done to entire nations, the human psyche and the physical environment....This is a devastating picture of Russia [that] penetrates deeply into the depressing truths of 70 years of Soviet rule, the borders, the fear, the inhumanity.... His portrait of the 'Imperium' is tragic, but ever so true."--Professor Thomas R. Beyer, Jr., Middlebury College, The Boston Globe

From the Back Cover:

The Soccer War

"Kapuscinski is the conjuror extraordinary of modern reportage. The soccer War is a splendid example of his magic."

-- John Le Carre

"Here is perhaps the most essential of the century's figures -- the wandering dissident, who is always on the side of emancipation but who has had to find a way of getting his point not only past the censors but into the indifferent skulls of the readers as well."

-- Christopher Hitchens, New York Newsday

Shah Of Shahs

"[This] is a book of great economy and power. It has its author's skill with vivid imagery, a breathless way of writing that carries the reader along, a supreme sense of the absurd."

Fouad Ajami, The New Republic

"Kapuscinski's last book was The Emperor, a superb evocation of the decay of Haile Selassie's court. Now he has written an equally evocative description of the end of the Shah of Iran. It is wonderful."

-- William Shawcross

The Emperor

Kapuscinski's writing, always wonderfully concrete and observant, conjures marvels of meaning out of minutiae. And his book transcends reportage, becoming a nightmare of power...that reads as if Italo Calvino had rewritten Machiavelli...An unforgettable, fiercely comic, and finally compassionate book."

-- Salman Rushdie

"Kapuscinski has delivered to us what may be the last message from a time when societies did not change... [A] sensitive, powerful, and surprisingly merciful book."

-- Neal Ascherson, The New York Review of Books

About this edition

• Publisher: Vintage
• Publication date: 1995
• ISBN 10: 067974780X
• ISBN 13: 9780679747802
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 352