'This is a very personal book, about being alone and lost'. In 1975 Kapuscinski's employers sent him to Angola to cover the civil war that had broken out after independence. For months he watched as Luanda and then the rest of the country collapsed into a civil war that was in the author's words 'sloppy, dogged and cruel'. In his account, Kapuscinski demonstrates an extraordinary capacity to describe and to explain the individual meaning of grand political abstractions.
Author Biography
Ryszard Kapuscinski was a renowned journalist and writer whose previous books include The Emperor: Downfall of an Autocrat (which Salman Rushdie called 'an unforgettable, fiercely comic, and finally compassionate book'), The Shadow of the Sun, Shah of Shahs, Imperium and The Soccer War. Allen Lane also publish his last book Travels With Herodotus. He died in January 2007.
