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Count me as one of those whom this article says would have mistaken Kapuscinski for Polish espresso, but he certainly sounds fascinating.

From the New York Times:

“Ryszard Kapuscinski disappeared in the dead of winter, January 2007, half as well known as his influence would lead one to expect. He went into the beyond Nobel-less, like Joyce and Proust and Nabokov, but to many who read him he was as exalted: “deity” was used, more than once, in his assorted funeral songs. While such desperate formulations as “world literature” conjure up bongos, beads and sitting Indian-style, the books Kapuscinski wrote may actually qualify, as evocative and singular in English as they are in their native (and what is said to be austerely fine) Polish. For many of us, the day of his death was a dark, cold day.

Until 1983, most Western readers would have mistaken the man for Polish espresso. Kapuscinski’s first book to appear in English, thanks to the translation of the husband-and-wife team of William R. Brand and Katarzyna Mroczkowska-Brand, was “The Emperor” (originally published in Polish in 1978), a spell-casting oral history of Haile Selassie’s rule over Ethiopia. “The Emperor” was followed in 1985 by what many believe to be Kapuscinski’s masterpiece, “Shah of Shahs” (originally published in 1982), a short, tense, fragmentary account of the 1979 Iranian revolution. In 1987 came “Another Day of Life” (originally published in Polish in 1976), his bizarre and shattering reportage from Angola as its former Portuguese overlords fled for their lives.

These three books brought Kapuscinski acclaim in the West as perhaps the world’s leading literary journalist. The acclaim was rather tardy, seeing that for the past three decades Kapuscinski had been filing dispatches from the Indian subcontinent, Asia, Latin America and, most often, Africa, initially in the service of a Polish youth journal as its first and only foreign correspondent and later for the Polish Press Agency. As his now famous about-the-author note from “The Shadow of the Sun” (2001) informs us, Kapuscinski “witnessed 27 coups and revolutions” and “was sentenced to death four times,” a biographical precis many nonfiction writers would do anything, short of earning it, to have.

Visit Site: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/10/books/review/Bissell-t.html?ex=1339128000...