The Illuminated Letters Of a Polish Journalist

He was outflanked by Western reporters with more money, more time and more influence, and it did not matter. He gained access to the lowly and the lowly servants of the elite, or just wandered among the soldiers and the killers.

On the border between Ethiopia and Somalia, 1976:

"The airplane took off, leaving us alone in the sun with the pesticide. We covered our heads with newspapers so that we could stand the molten heat, so that we wouldn't fall over, it was so hot. The Ogaden desert burned all around and now, high noon, there was no sign of life. We were looking at the most uncomplicated of images, reduced to two planes: at the bottom, a band of earth; higher, into infinity, the expanse of sky. In the middle, two drops of sweat, Marcos and I."

He arrived at political and personal insights by possessing steel nerves (he was once nearly set aflame by soldiers), a cast-iron stomach (you wouldn't believe the food), great narrative skill and a unique view of the web of life.

Death approaching, in the war between Honduras and El Salvador that followed a soccer match:

"Everyone was absorbed, silent, concentrating on the sight of the wounded man. He was drawing breath more slowly now, and his head had tilted back. The soldiers sitting near him grasped their hands around their knees and hunched up, as if the fire was burning low and the cold creeping in. In the end -- it was a while yet -- somebody said: 'He's gone. All he was is gone.' " They stayed there for some time, looking fearfully at the dead man and afterwards, when they saw that nothing else would happen, they began walking away."

Kapuscinski never could have happened in America.

We're too literal. We want facts to be things that, you know, actually happened. Not rumors, which he reported. And we want our characters to be real human beings, not composites, as he often made them (without telling readers this was so), and then quoted them at length. He acknowledged that he never really bothered with notes.

"I don't write down conversations," he told Vanity Fair in a 1991 interview. "If I am talking to somebody, I am trying to remember only one thing that he says, maybe two things. And then I'm finished -- forget about the rest."

In rural Africa, in urban Latin America, in a book written in Polish years after the fact, who was ever going to say you got it wrong, the quote from the unnamed soldier at the hellish checkpoint?

But Salman Rushdie was right when he said that you don't read Kapuscinski for the facts. You read him for the way he turned a misbegotten part of the world on its edge, then showed you how it all really worked, like opening a watch and showing you all the little gears rolling around one another.

One complete Kapuscinski chapter:

"Pack the suitcase. Unpack it, pack it, unpack it, pack it; typewriter, passport, ticket, airport, stairs, airplane, fasten seat-belt, take off, unfasten seat-belt, flight, rocking, sun, stars, space, hips of strolling stewardesses, sleep, clouds, falling engine speed, fasten seat-belt, descent, circling, landing, earth, unfasten seat-belts, stairs, airport, immunization book, visa, customs, taxi, streets, houses, people, hotel, key, room, stuffiness, thirst, otherness, foreignness, loneliness, waiting, fatigue, life."

Poetry.