Rating: 
Summary: THE SHADOW OF A CONTINENT
Review: Kapuscinski. one of the world's most underrated journalists, takes you on a forty year journey through the African continent. Like much of Kapuscinki's work, he walks the roads where few journalists go. His is a peoples view of the continent. The heat. The smells. The forlorness. The dangers that lurk around each corner. The optimism and the hopelessness that seems to weave through out the continent.
The book is more of a travel warning than a travel guide. Kapuscinski does not try to give the reader a history lesson, but instead reports the everyday facts that he encountered as he crossed the country speaking with everyone from isolated lepers to Heads of State.
Reading the essays in this book may not give you reason to believe that Africa is on the mend but it will give you insight into the strength, spirituality and even optimisim of the "common" people who live in the most dire of circumstances.
Read Kapuscinki's and Robert Kaplan's works to get a non political view of what it is like to survive and live in undeveloped countries.
Rating:
Summary: Great reading...
Review: More than just a docier or biographical narrative, "Shadow of the Sun" is a series of impressions rendered by a writer of exceptional talent, considerable experience, and profound vision. The vignettes capture episodes from the author's experiences on the great continent over a span of more than thirty years. His goal is not to provide a primer in contemporary African history, or to sermonize about the region's poverty, famine, violence, or painful political upheavals. As other's have mentioned, there are other books more suited to these pursuits. His goal is to convey moments of elation, terror, awe, and desperation experienced over the course of a long and distinguished career as a journalist. Ryszard Kapuscinski is a not an historian, a political scientist, or a sociologist - he is a teller of tales, and a master of language. These stories move, astound, touch, and disturb the reader. The essays expose the highest, lowest, and most absurd types of human behavior, setting all against the limitless and impassive backdrop of the African continent. The essays in "The Soccer War" and "Imperium" might overall be more unified and cohesive, but in the world of contemporary literature, it doesn't get much better than this.
Rating:
Summary: Kapuscinski's excellent adventure
Review: Perhaps the language ought to make a distinction between the well-traveled and the deeply-traveled. It is, after all, possible to travel the world and never leave 5-star hotel nation. This, make no mistake about it, is not the path taken by Kapuscinski. Nor is The Shadow of the Sun another mind-numbing recitation of infra-structure investment needs, legal reforms and the like. Not, in other words, your standard World Bank report. Kapuscinski does nothing to reduce his exposure; he finds a cobra next to his bed; is routinely savaged by insects the size of small turtles; recounts the fear in a village once its inhabitants discover that the fish in their river have grown exceptionally large, apparently from feasting on the dead remains of Idi Amin's victims and; he is humbled in an otherwise festive gathering when a rogue elephant invites himself to the party. He covers all this exceptional ground with a prose that stays lucid (or is exceptionally well-translated or both), and precise. His language is grounded, thankfully avoiding the mystic prose that often pours from writers that encounter worlds that defy easy classification and comforting predictability. It would seem to take a lifetime to understand the complexity of Africa. To read Kapuscinski is, in my view, to take a crash intro-course. The Shadow of the Sun, broad as it is, is still a sample. It's posssible to find in Africa successful, modern enterprises. And, that too is part of the puzzle. Everything seems posssible there -- all that was past still resides, while the future makes what inroads it can. There are wonderful, communal moments in this book, and divisive clan-based savergy. Kindness, cruelty; honesty, theft; promise and peril: all this and more in this slender volume, captured by a master of his craft.
Rating: 
Summary: Too long in the mid-day Sun
Review: Ryszard Kapuscinski has vast experience in Africa from Rwanda and Tanzania in the East to Nigeria and Liberia in the West. He travelled the unbeaten paths and stayed away from the Hotels, Embassy functions and expatriate social circles. His publishers tell you his credentials as an objective analyzer of 'the true Africa' are impeccable, because Poland was never a colonizer, and he is unencumbered by the type of post-colonial guilt that clouds the views of other European commentators. All this is true perhaps, but there are a few points to consider before reading THE SHADOW OF THE SUN.(1) Does experiencing something automatically make one an authority on that subject? (2)What's the difference between a journalist and a travel writer, and can either of them engage in "poetic license"? (3)Is being well written sufficient recommendation for a Non-fiction book? and (4) How much does reputation, expectation and publishing hype play in the writing, reception and marketing of a book? Put all of these in the mix when you read this book, which is a collection of personal vignettes of Polish journalist Ryszard Kapuscinski's 30 plus years of on-and-off reporting from Africa. Put them in the mix because the author has admitted in the past that literary considerations take precedence. Over what? Could it be facts? Putting that aside, let's look at the claim that experience and being from a country that never colonized but in fact - like much of Africa, was itself conquered - gives the author a predisposition to understanding. This is proven false very early in the book with some banal generalizations. The comments on time and the pace of African life strike me as exactly the type of eurocentricity that he says he's incapable of. "Africans apprehend time differently. For them, it is a much looser concept, more open, elastic" and life itself is conducted more "naturally, freely, at a tempo determined by climate and tradition..." It's the sort of explanation offered by social psychologists. Read A GEOGRAPHY OF TIME for the full development of those ideas. That author at least used humor, and was somewhat tongue-in-cheek with his observations. Mr Kapuscinski on the other hand is very serious indeed. "With each book you write you should lose the admirers you gained with the previous one" (Andre Gide) True but that happens with improvement not with a step backwards. Mr Kapuscinski, come out of the Sun before you write another book.
Rating: 
Summary: Unique portrait of Africa's peoples and complexities
Review: Ryszard Kapuscinski is a Polish reporter who has been covering Africa since 1957. Through the years, he's written six books about his experiences. This, his latest, is a collection of essays spanning more than four decades. Each can stand alone, and yet, together they form a unique portrait of Africa, its peoples, and the writer himself. From the initial enthusiasm in the 1950s when colonial power began to wane to the destruction of that dream and war and starvation, Mr. Kapuscinski sees it all. He keeps the reader right there with him too, and we share the heat and the dryness and the insects and even the malaria and tuberculosis that attack his body. We all know that Africa is very different from the world we know, and in this book we learn just how different it is. We learn about the African's identity with his clan, we get a feeling of his sense of time and distance, and understand the joy of something as simple as a sip of water or a small shady spot under a tree. Always, there is heat, so oppressive that people walk slowly to conserve energy and do nothing but lie quietly during the hot burning heat of the day. It's the keenly observed details that bring it all to life. For example, the introduction of plastic containers for carrying water improved the lives of the people. Plastic containers are lighter and come in various sizes. Children can carry water now, thus freeing adult women from hours of work. Reading about this makes me thankful for the clean running water I take for granted. I also learned a lot about some of the raging wars. For the first time, I really understood what exactly the war was about in Rwanda and why so many people died. And his descriptions of the various governments in Liberia and the horrible in-fighting was very clear. I shuddered to read about so many murders in the places he came to know so well. And there were tears in my eyes reading about the starvation and the reasons for it. I'm deeply saddened too, because I see no easy answers. The episodic nature of the book was both its strength and its weakness. It's true that I got an excellent overview. But the chapters skipped around, from place to place and covered a span of more than forty years. I would have preferred a more in-depth look at any one area. I understand though, that his other books are more focused in this way and I look forward to reading more of his work. I also wish he had included some maps as well as a few photographs. In spite of this, however, I do recommend this book. It really did deepen my understanding of this very complex continent.
Rating:
Summary: A Passport to Africa.
Review: Ryszard Kapuscinski's is Poland's celebrated foreign correspondent for the Polish news and he knows Africa like few do. He has been traversing the continent for more than 40 years.
His experiences are arranged in chronological essays dating from 1958 to the 1990s in "The Shadow of the Sun." Details are luxurious. The beauty and horror of Africa is palpable. Lucidly, he brings us coups d'etat, early independence days, wildlife, various cultures and the heat-"so intense that it causes minds to retreat into stupor."
Kapuscinski succeeds in bringing us the authentic lives of ordinary Africans. He wanders with "passing trucks ... nomads through the desert ... peasants of the tropical savannah." This white man lives in the African neighborhood, not the exclusive safe places of wealth for tourists and the minority rich. "I want to live in an African street, in an African building. How else can I get to know this city? This continent?" And he succeeds.
"The Shadow Of The Sun" fathoms the unfathomable, Africa-"a veritable ocean." He also manages to educate without boring us. One essay, "A lecture on Rwanda," clearly illustrates the roots of a massacre. Kapuscinski's book is a remarkable achievement-a passport to understanding this complex area of the world. Africa waits to be explored in this wonderful, concise book.
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Summary: A Brilliant Adventurer
Review: Shadow of the Sun is yet another amazing effort by Kapuscinski. The book covers his time in Africa over the last 40 years, and he is as illuminating as ever on the subject. As I read, it seemed to me that he had perhaps slept on a dirt floor in a hut in every village on the continent. This book is ideal for anyone who has that urge to wander around the most exotic locales. My favorite part: Kapuscinski arrives in Monrovia, Liberia, where his vaccination records, passport, and return ticket are promptly snatched from his hands the moment he steps off the plane. Though he knows no one there, Kapuscinski is soon taken under the wings of some Lebanese business men who live there and who explain to him that the "transaction" at the airport is simply a part of how business is done in the war torn country. Kapuscinski eventually leaves the country, but you'll have to read the book to find out how.
Rating:
Summary: Beautiful
Review: The beauty and power of this book does justice to the history and people of Africa. I did not want this book to end. Kapuczinski is one of the greatest living journalists and his work shines with poetry and beauty.
Rating:
Summary: The Shadow of the Sun
Review: The shadow of the sun is an intensely personal, non-linear account of Ryszard Kapuscinskis forty years in Africa. Poetically written, it describes Africa as a land of extremes: drought, sun, heat, storms , disease, and political instability. His decades long desire to know the heart and soul of the African people led him to travel extensively on that continent, often at great personal risk. The vignettes he describes give us a glimpse into some of the 10,000 different cultures on that continent. They also give us a clear view of our common humanity. I enjoyed this book, not as a historic document or sociologic report,but as an epic poem of one mans voyage of discovery.
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Summary: Upclose view of Africa..... Beautiful and Horrid
Review: This book continues the author's account of his 35+ years in Africa and living with its people. Both facinating and easy reading this book captured the beauty of the continent and its people and also its despair and rot. I strongly reccommend it for all those interested in Africa.
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