Imperium - Softcover

Kapuscinski, Ryszard

4.36

6,856 ratings by Goodreads

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1862079609 ISBN 13: 9781862079601

Publisher: Granta Books, 2007

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Ryszard Kapuściński (March 4, 1932 - January 23, 2007) was a Polish journalist and writer whose dispatches in book form brought him a global reputation. Also a photographer and poet, he was born in Pińsk-now in Belarus-in the Kresy Wschodnie or eastern borderlands of the second Polish Republic, into poverty: he would say later that he felt at home in Africa as "food was scarce there too and everyone was also barefoot". Kapuściński himself called his work "literary reportage", and reportage d'auteur. In the English-speaking world, his genre is sometimes characterised as "magic journalism" (in counterpoint to magic realism), a term coined for him by Adam Hochschild in 1994. More recently, during the period since his death, scholars have indicated the similarities between Kapuściński's style of writing and the traditional Polish form known as the gawęda szlachecka.

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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."

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