Shadow of the sun (Penguin Books)

'Only with the greatest of simplifications, for the sake of convenience, can we say Africa. In reality, except as a geographical term, Africa doesn't exist'. Ryszard Kapuscinski has been writing about the people of Africa throughout his career.

In astudy that avoids the official routes, palaces and big politics, he sets out to create an account of post-colonial Africa seen at once as a whole and as a location that wholly defies generalised explanations.

It is both a sustained meditation on themosaic of peoples and practises we call 'Africa', and an impassioned attempt to come to terms with humanity itself as it struggles to escape from foreign domination, from the intoxications of freedom, from war and from politics as theft.

"This harrowing, at times shattering, chronicle of 40 years of adventures in Africa finds Kapuscinski in trouble again.... He crushes a cobra to save his life, moves with nomads through Somalia, and waits to die from thirst beneath a truck in the Sahara.

Kapuscinski alternates between plain prose and shimmering imagery, using understatement to dispel easy stereotypes about Africa and Africans, and finishing a paragraph or two of spare exposition with some dazzling revelation or note of remorse that leaves you reeling.

With rare exception, these distant episodes amaze." -- Brad Wieners, "Outside ""An astonishing piece of writing... As vital a book as any I've read in recent years, an outstanding introduction to the tangled threads of African culture and politics and a manual in the modes of human cruelty and redemption...

Kapuscinski... May be the greatest journalist of our time.... Kapuscinski bears his historical baggae lightly through the African landscape, but his inability to tell the story in the dispassionate tones of an outsider is what gives this visionary book such power." -- Mark Levine, "Men's Journal "From the U.K.: " ""A dazzling narrative historian, using his own experience as the principal archive....

he is never less than clear and pungent; his short chapter on the genocidal hatreds of Rwanda is worth a hundred newspaper features.... He brings the world to us as nobody else." -- Ian Jack, "The Observer" "Kapuscinski doesn't just 'cover' Africa -- he knows it.

His perspective is both vast and uniquely informed." -- Keith Wilson, "Focus" "His book most successfully conveys the charms, frustrations, tragedies, comedies, brutalities, and kindnesses of life in Africa....

as an observer, and as a recorder of his observations, he is second to none.