War Correspondent, Author Ryszard Kapuscinski

His books included "The Emperor," about Selassie's last days; "The Soccer Wars," covering military tensions in Latin America and some of his years in Africa; "Another Day of Life," about Angolan independence from Portugal; "The Shah of Shahs," about the Iranian revolution; and "Imperium," about the collapse of the Soviet Union.

He told the Scotsman newspaper after the 1994 publication of "Imperium": "More philosophically speaking, it's a book about the uselessness of human sacrifice, in which I'm saying that during the communist time almost 100 million people have been slaughtered and to me this situation, these sufferings and deprivation turn out to be for nothing.

"Nobody is seen to be responsible . . . that human suffering turns out to be useless."

Mr. Kapuscinski was born March 4, 1932, in Pinsk, an industrial city then in eastern Poland and now in southwestern Belarus. Pinsk was a polyglot of ethnicities, all living side by side and most in desperate poverty. He said life in Pinsk helped him assimilate easily when abroad.

After the Soviet invasion of 1939, the Kapuscinski family moved to a neighborhood near the Warsaw ghetto. He often saw mass executions of Jews. Meanwhile, his father, a schoolteacher, served in the Polish underground.

Ryszard Kapuscinski received a history degree from the University of Warsaw in 1955 and found a reporting job at a Communist journal.

He wrote a highly critical article about a steel factory near Cracow that was officially viewed as a beacon of the Communist ideal. He was fired but then reinstated and decorated by the state when a federal task force exonerated his findings.

Now a star, he persuaded his editors to send him abroad, and for years, he was Poland's only foreign correspondent. He went to India, then to Ghana to cover its independence from the United Kingdom, then to the Democratic Republic of Congo in time for the coup against Lumumba. He also spent time in Latin America and the Middle East.

Of the Iranian revolution in 1979 that deposed the repressive shah, he wrote: "Revolutions precisely begin when the man has stopped being afraid. He gets rid of his fear and feels free, without that there would be no revolution." His affiliation with the Solidarity anti-Communist trade union movement in Poland led his government to revoke his press credentials in 1981. Yet he worked regularly from abroad and published many more books, including a praised collection of his African reportage called "The Shadow of the Sun."

Survivors include his wife of more than 50 years, Alicja Mielczarek, a pediatrician; and a daughter.

For a man of adventure, he was reputed to be surprisingly humble. He shunned bluster when discussing his career. "Empathy is perhaps the most important quality for a foreign correspondent," he told the New York Times in 1987. "If you have it, other deficiencies are forgivable. If you don't, nothing much can help."