Rating: 
Summary: Under the African Sun
Review: A very readable and enjoyable book about the author's many travels as a journalist over 40 years in Africa. Each episode is interesting and many are related to danger; each time the author has survived to relate another story!In Africa droughts and war have depopulated areas of the bush and driven the inhabitants into the cities involving tens of millions of people and creating expressions of hope and gestures of despair. The relentless burning heat of the sun is indisputable in Africa and makes life hard for the inhabitants and travellers alike. There is sadness and loveliness. There are injustices to the African resulting from the impact of colonialism. There are people fleeing from one another. What does the African possess? All too often just a handful of rice, an old shirt, a piece of blanket and a clay pot. The author has seen it all, experienced the size of cockroaches, trucks stuck in muddied rivers. He has visited in his travels Zanzibar, Tanzania, Kenya, Ghana, Senegal, Uganda, Mauritania, Ethiopia and a host of other African countries. Kapuscinski paints pictures of Africa - of its hungry people, of young unemployed children - boys, often drugged, who do battle with guns. There is a cry from the heart for the children of Africa. The author observes each situation that arises. He has adventures in Ethiopia and Nigeria, he visits African markets, enjoys the lushness of the forests of the Cameroon. He observes the warlords in the Sudan, Angola, Somalia and Chad. He spends time with the half a million Tuareg people in the countries of North Africa. He tells of the crises and murders of dictators in Liberia and Monrovia; he relates the misery of Ruanda and Burundi and explains the history of these people. The book is excellent. Lacking, in my opinion, was a map of the African continent and also a Contents page and an Index at the back.
Rating: 
Summary: Stunning
Review: As a New Yorker who has read very little about Africa, I found the book astounding. Kapuscinski is a fabulous writer, the images of Africa vivid and palpable. Here is his description of his first night in Monrovia: "The only window in my room (number 107) gave out on a gloomy, fetid air shaft, from which a revolting odor arose. I turned on the light. The walls, the bed, the table, and the floor were black. Black with cockroaches." From this you can imagine the vividness of his descriptions of the innumerable bloody wars and tribal infighting that have plagued so much of Africa.
Rating:
Summary: Readable recollection of years spent reporting from Africa
Review: For four decades Ryszard Kapuscinski was "Poland's most celebrated foreign correspondent", developing a specialty for reporting from violent Third World countries. He was the first, (and, for a long time, the only) Polish foreign correspondent in Africa. "The Shadow of the Sun", unlike his books that each focus on one country, is a collection of non-fiction short stories from his many years all over Africa. Each chapter is a miniature portrait or vignette of some person, place, or event; some of these are historical (Samuel Doe or Idi Amin, for example), others are personal (the author's apartment in Lagos, killing a snake on a long-distance drive, visiting a village). All are written with a beautiful precision that captures both Africa's first few decades of independence (1958 - 1990) as well as Kapuscinski's reactions to Africa. Here is a first-rate author, and a very good book. It is good that Kapuscinski's stories will be available to those that do not read Polish.
Rating:
Summary: Get a taste of Africa..and a smell..and a feel!
Review: I can hardly praise this book enough and should have probably given it five stars instead of four! First of all it is so well written (which is rare these days) and so different then if let's say a CNN correpondent would have written a book about Africa. Kapuscinsky goes to the core of the Africa experience, gets sick, stays in hell holes and flea bag hotels and writes about it in a non judgemental and very human way. It's also a great book to begin to understand why Africa is in the situation it is today. This is my first book by this author, a friend of mine loaned it to me. It won't be my last however. I'll keep you posted.
Rating:
Summary: Broad and Journalistic
Review: I dove into this book with insatiable enthusiasm but I came away from it with a bad taste in my mouth. What makes this book so highly readable is that it is not a history book per se, it's a journalistic account of an entire continent. It is subject at times to a degree of sensationalism, and while mostly professionally written, there are pieces I do not care for. Kapuscinski's graphic account of coups and social problems in Africa make me never want to find myself there.
Rating:
Summary: The dream that was and the reality that is Africa
Review: I must confess that I have never visited Africa. I know it only through books, and to a lesser extent, TV and movies. The older books on Africa emphasized its alienness, and the archetipal treatment of the continent and its peoples is that of Conrad's Heart of Darkness. And most of the recent books I've read about Africa (like Michela Wrong's "In the Footsteps of Mr Kurtz", Adam Hochschild's "King Leopold's Ghost", Phillip Gourevitch's "We Wish to Inform you that Tomorrow we Will be Killed with Our Families", or Giles Foden's "The Last King of Scotland", or certain parts of Paul Theroux's "Sir Vidia's Shadow") focus on the breakdown of the continent and its apparently bottomless ability to disappoint even the most meagre expectations. Kapuscinski's book takes a different tack. The book reviews the author's experiences of Africa over a period of over 40 years. Although the narrative does not shy of notorious characters (like Uganda's Idi Amin or Liberia's Samuel Doe) or episodes (like the Rwandan Tutsi genocide or the Ethiopian-Somali war), his focus are the common people, the "bayaye", or uprooted peasants, swept into the smouldering cities by the winds of war or hunger. He lives with these people in their "bidonvilles" (slums), travels with them in clattering buses and visits them in the bush and the desert. As he proudly notes, most other foreign journalists usually stick to a few international hotels or white enclaves, and rarely stray form the well-beaten track (he mentions the incredulity of a colleague, who couldn't understand why he would visit one of the smaller countries if he wasn't meeting with the President). Kapuscinski did not want to confine his relationship with Africa to living the comfortable life of a white expat while reporting on the activities of the official classes (which doesn't mean that he doesn't go all the way for a story, such as being the first foreign correspondent to visit Zanzibar during the Black takeover against the Arabs). As Poland's most famous foreign correspondent, it was his privilege to arrive to Africa during the late 1950s, when the independence movements were starting to come together and Africa was rather a land of hope. He captures very well the elan of that hopeful point in time, when it seemed that the blight of colonialism would be erased and the new African nations would take control of their destinies and use their extraordinary natural and human resources to improve everyone's lot. He narrates how inter-tribal warfare, corruption and Western (especially French) meddling put that illusion to rest, and does not flinch from describing the awfulness of the more recent years (using Liberia as a proxy for many other countries). He prefers not to write about notorious events, such as South Africa's evolution from Apartheid or the former Zaire's disintegration in the post-Mobutu era. He does not like to be obvious, and prefers to tell us that which others haven't told. In spite of his sympathy towards the people he writes about, Kapuscinski is never sentimental, and never condescending. Those wishing to read about Africa as cultural cradle to the world or beacon of a superior communitarian culture should go back to their well thumbed copies of Bernal's "Black Athena". Those wishing to know what it was, and is really like, should read Kapuscinski. Having read the book, my impression that things will not right themselves and that Africa will not pull through has been strengthened. So in the end maybe Kapusckinski's view is not so different from some of the writers mentioned above. But he takes his readers through the scenic route to reach it.
Rating:
Summary: Very good - a couple of problems, though
Review: I really enjoyed reading this book, but I was disappointed at the factual errors in explaining the origins of the Hutu and the Tutsi people (which is that these groups were "assigned" by the Dutch depending on how tall a person was and how big their nose was). Also, I would have appreciated a little bit more cohesiveness. The book jumps around from area to area, but I often wanted to know more or know the background of certain situations.
Rating:
Summary: Very good - a couple of problems, though
Review: I really enjoyed reading this book, but I was disappointed at the factual errors in explaining the origins of the Hutu and the Tutsi people (which is that these groups were "assigned" by the Dutch depending on how tall a person was and how big their nose was). Also, I would have appreciated a little bit more cohesiveness. The book jumps around from area to area, but I often wanted to know more or know the background of certain situations.
Rating:
Summary: Very good - a couple of problems, though
Review: I really enjoyed reading this book, but I was disappointed at the factual errors in explaining the origins of the Hutus and the Tutsi people (which is that these groups were "assigned" by the Dutch depending on how tall a person was and how big their nose was). Also, I would have appreciated a little bit more cohesiveness. The books jumps around from area to area, but I often wanted to know more or know the background of certain situations.
Rating:
Summary: Very good - a couple of problems, though
Review: I really enjoyed reading this book, but I was disappointed at the factual errors in explaining the origins of the Hutus and the Tutsi people (which is that these groups were "assigned" by the Dutch depending on how tall a person was and how big their nose was). Also, I would have appreciated a little bit more cohesiveness. The books jumps around from area to area, but I often wanted to know more or know the background of certain situations.
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