Imperium - Softcover

Ryszard Kapuscinsk

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0140140697 ISBN 13: 9780140140699

Publisher: Granta, 1995

Synopsis

During the year the Berlin Wall came down, as the empire convulsed and died, Kapuscinski talked to hundreds of ordinary people about their extraordinary lives and the terror from which they were emerging. Imperium is a race to capture people's memories, and their fears for the future, before the wonderful, terrible events of 1989 receded into the past.

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 Inside Flap

scinski's last book, The Soccer War -a revelation of the contemporary experience of war -- prompted John le Carre to call the author "the conjurer extraordinary of modern reportage." Now, in Imperium, Kapuscinski gives us a work of equal emotional force and evocative power: a personal, brilliantly detailed exploration of the almost unfathomably complex Soviet empire in our time.

He begins with his own childhood memories of the postwar Soviet occupation of Pinsk, in what was then Poland's eastern frontier ("something dreadful and incomprehensible...in this world that I enter at seven years of age"), and takes us up to 1967, when, as a journalist just starting out, he traveled across a snow-covered and desolate Siberia, and through the Soviet Union's seven southern and Central Asian republics, territories whose individual histories, cultures, and religions he found thriving even within the "stiff, rigorous corset of Soviet power."

Between 1989 and

Edition details

• Publisher: Granta
• Publication date: 1995
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0140140697
• ISBN 13: 9780140140699
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 352