The Shadow of the Sun
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- ISBN13: 9780679779070
- Condition: NEW
- Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
Product Description
In 1957, Ryszard Kapuscinski arrived in Africa to witness the beginning of the end of colonial rule as the first African correspondent of Poland’s state newspaper. From the early days of independence in Ghana to the ongoing ethnic genocide in Rwanda, Kapuscinski has crisscrossed vast distances pursuing the swift, and regularly violent, events that followed liberation. Kapuscinski hitchhikes with caravans, wanders the Sahara with nomads, and lives in the poverty-stricken slums of Nigeria. He wrestles a king cobra to the death and suffers through a bout of malaria.
What emerges is an extraordinary depiction of Africa–not as a group of nations or geographic locations–but as a vibrant and frequently jolly montage of peoples, cultures, and encounters. Kapuscinski’s trenchant observations, wry analysis and overwhelming humanity paint a remarkable portrait of the continent and its people. His unorthodox approach and profound respect for the people he meets challenge conventional understandings of the modern problems faced by Africa at the dawn of the twenty-first century.
Amazon.com Review
When Africa makes international news, it is usually because war has broken out or some bizarre natural disaster has taken a large number of lives. Westerners are appallingly ignorant of Africa otherwise, a condition that the fantastic Polish journalist and writer Ryszard Kapuœciñski helps remedy with this book based on observations gathered over more than four decades.
Kapuœciñski first went to Africa in 1957, a time pregnant with possibilities as one country after another confirmed independence from the European colonial powers. Persons powers, he writes, had “jam-packed the approximately ten thousand kingdoms, federations, and stateless but independent clannish associations that existed on this continent in the middle of the nineteenth century within the limits of barely forty colonies.” When independence came, ancient interethnic rivalries, long suppressed, bubbled up to the surface, and the continent was consumed in small 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 additional life-and-death resources, and whose struggles among one another fuel the continent’s seemingly endless civil wars. When the warlords “choose that everything worthy of plunder has been extracted,” Kapuœciñski writes, wearily, they call a peace talks 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
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Ryszard Kapuscinski has vast experience in Africa from Rwanda and Tanzania in the East to Nigeria and Liberia in the West. He travelled the victorious paths and stayed away from the Hotels, Embassy functions and expatriate social circles. His publishers tell you his credentials as an objective analyzer of ‘the right Africa’ are impeccable, because Poland was never a colonizer, and he is unencumbered by the type of post-colonial guilt that clouds the views of additional European commentators. All this is right perhaps, but there are a few points to consider before reading THE SHADOW OF THE SUN.(1) Does experiencing something automatically make one an power on that theme? (2)What’s the difference between a journalist and a travel writer, and can either of them engage in “poetic license”? (3)Is being well written sufficient recommendation for a Non-fiction book? and (4) How much does reputation, expectation and publishing hype play in the writing, reception and marketing of a book? Place all of these in the mix when you read this book, which is a collection of personal vignettes of Polish journalist Ryszard Kapuscinski’s 30 plus years of on-and-off reporting from Africa.
Place them in the mix because the leader has admitted in the past that literary considerations take precedence. Over what? Could it be facts? Putting that aside, let’s look at the aver that experience and being from a country that never colonized but in fact – like much of Africa, was itself conquered – gives the leader a predisposition to understanding. This is proven fake very early in the book with some banal generalizations. The comments on time and the pace of African life strike me as exactly the type of eurocentricity that he says he’s incapable of. “Africans apprehend time differently. For them, it is a much looser concept, more open, supple” and life itself is conducted more “naturally, freely, at a tempo determined by climate and tradition…” It’s the sort of explanation offered by social psychologists. Read A GEOGRAPHY OF TIME for the full development of persons thoughts. That leader at least used humor, and was to some extent tongue-in-cheek with his observations. Mr Kapuscinski on the additional hand is very serious indeed.
“With each book you write you should lose the admirers you gained with the previous one” (Andre Gide)
Right but that happens with improvement not with a step backwards. Mr Kapuscinski, come out of the Sun before you write another book.
Reader’s Rating: 2 / 5
I dove into this book with insatiable enthusiasm but I came away from it with a terrible taste in my mouth. What makes this book so highly readable is that it is not a history book per se, it’s a journalistic account of an entire continent. It is theme at times to a degree of sensationalism, and while mostly well written, there are pieces I do not care for. Kapuscinski’s graphic account of coups and social problems in Africa make me never want to find myself there.
Reader’s Rating: 4 / 5
Kapuscinski takes you to the parts of Africa that few know exist. Many people reflect “safari” when referring to Africa. This leader will take you to Zanzibar, the Sahara, and additional exotic locales as he discusses daily life and thoughts of the inhabitants. Informative and colorful.
Reader’s Rating: 5 / 5
When it was learned that Janet Cooke, a Washington Post reporter, had made up a upsetting account of the life of a young inner city drug addict, she was promptly sacked. Ryszard Kapuscinksi, the Polish journalist who seems to have regularly escaped death on his many of his assignments, takes what might kindly be called liberties with the reality and wins acclaim. He has, the argument goes, revealed inner truths rumor has it that not accessible to additional journalists who use more conventional techniques. This may be the case with some of his earlier books, but his latest work, The Shadow of the Sun, is a seldom revealing, and regularly mundane, account of his travels in Africa. This does not deter the publisher from building some foolish claims on Mr Kapuscinksi’s behalf, including the assertion that Shadow of the Sun provides “first hand accounts of the main political events in Africa over nearly half a century”. The 325 page book does not, but, have anything to say about the end of white rule in southern Africa. Nor does it have anything profound to say about Tanzania, where Mr Kapuscinski was based at one stage in his career as a reporter for the Polish news agency. Tanzania was the country which saw the compulsory relocation of millions of farmers and their families as ex- president Julius Nyerere pursued his disastrous vision of African socialism. In the book itself, some of the “facts” are incorrect, such as the extraordinary aver that before the second world war the “inhabitants of Africa were not permitted to travel to Europe”. If readers want fiction which provides insight into Africa’s plight, read VS Naipaul’s Bend in the River. If they want fact, read Blaine Harden – formerly of the Washington Post – Despatches from a Fragile Continent. It is far from clear what Mr Kapuscinski thinks he is offering. A distinguished reporter has used his ancient notebooks as a guide to a complex continent, but this time he has lost his way.
Reader’s Rating: 1 / 5
Shadow of the Sun
Brilliant introduction to the African continent. The leader’s writing is clear and gorgeous. He writes in a way that richly evokes the images and experiences that he is going through, but his writing is light and to-the-point, not burdened with unnecessary or long-winded description. A master of writing style.
What also helps is that Kapuchinski truly has fantastic insight into the people, systems, and cultures he encounters, and his experiences are truly unique and exciting because he was courageous enough to go where most white people did not.
The only “flaw” of this book was, for me, the fact that the overall picture of the African continent and its people was rather depressing. One finishes this book and despairs a bit for the future of Africa. It is all understandable: such fantastic poverty, such one-sided leadership systems, such corruption and rule of brute force, such lack of education and learning…how can things ever get better?
This feeling of desolation is what is leaning me against reading another of Kapuchinski’s books, at least anytime soon. Moreover, although he wrote about lots of different places, the tales to some extent start to sound very similar – they are mostly tales of cruelty, oppression, injustice, poverty and hunger, lack of security, and random violence. Sure, the details of the “how” differ – but the “what” is reasonably similar. While I suppose that is the reality for a large part of Africa, I can’t help feeling that once I have read one book like that, I already know to some extent what the next one will say.
Reader’s Rating: 4 / 5