Rating: 
Summary: Great book
Review: This is a very good book on Africa. The book is based on the author's notes (recollections) of his experience in different parts of the continent. He discusses his experiences in different places at different times (from the 1960's onward). The variety and the vivid descriptions of the stories kept me glued to the book.... The only discontent I had about the book is that the book does not have enough positive images of Africa. This book is good but not as good as the author's earlier book, The Emperor.
Rating: 
Summary: informative and personal
Review: This is great if you want to understand modern Africa. As an American, this was a great introduction to a world so far away. Very intriguing, and now I want to read everything else by this author.
Rating:
Summary: An all-around gorgeous book!
Review: This writer is an amazing man! He not only traveled through Africa, he traveled with Africans through several decades. Speaking their language, eating their food (which wasn't much outside of rice and bananas), and living among them as a friend, not a merely curious white man. I couldn't put this book down! If you are interested in the struggles and culture of modern-day African countries then this is a book you absolutely must read!
Rating:
Summary: Kapuscinski at his finest
Review: To say that this is the best book on Africa that I have ever read would not amount to much of a recommendation, since I have not read much on the subject. However, I can honestly say that it is one of the 10 best books that I have ever read, period! Kapuscinski might know more about Africa than any other non-African writer in the world, since he has spent many years there and been to seemingly every country on the continent. This book contains two dozen or so essays, each about 10 pages long and dealing with one of Kapuscinski's adventures. There are dispatches from everywhere: Ghana, Uganda, Ethiopia, Eritrea, Sudan, Mali, Mauritania, Cameroon, Liberia, Nigeria, Tanzania, Somalia, Zanzibar, and probably a few more countries that escape my memory. There is something here for everybody. If you are looking for penetrating analyses of current affairs, there is a great chapter on Idi Amin, a chapter on the social origins of the Rwandan genocide, an insider's account of one of Nigeria's many military coups, and many others. One of my favorite chapters was about the Liberian civil war. In a particularly telling scene, two men approach Kapuscinski in the airport just after he has arrived. "We will protect you," one of them says without emotion. "Without us, you will perish." One of Kapuscinski's great strenghts is his ability to convey everyday life in the places he is reporting from, and especially the ways in which that life is disrupted by wars, famines, military takeovers, etc. His dispatches from Liberia, southern Sudan, and Ethiopia are particularly moving. Some of my favorite stories, however, come from Kapuscinski's visits to ordinary African villages far from any cities or major highways. He has an uncanny ability to describe the tenor of life in these places. He describes a typical day in a tiny village near border between Senegal and Mauritania. After beginning the morning by praying towards Mecca, each villager visits every other villager, inquiring about their health, how well they slept the night before, and other trivial matters. It is little scenes like this that I love about Kapuscinski's books. There are hundreds of foreign correspondents out there that have written some great work from the most far flung corners of the globe, but none of them can match Kapuscinski's ability to describe the mundane with such insight, compassion, and humanity. There are some things I take issue with in the book. For instance, Kapuscinski often comes off as a cultural determinist, explaining a country's social and economic underdevelopment by pointing to cultural and religious influences. These are undoubtedly important factors, but Kapuscinski often seems resigned to the fact that such practices and values are immutable. Also, there are relatively few women in this book. This is undoubtedly partly to do with the fact that he is writing about very patriarchical societies, where women have less of a role in public life, but it still would have been nice if he had addressed the issue. There is one particular seen that I will not forget, when Kapuscinski visits a Ugandan village in which the women literally kneel every time a man walks by. Kapuscinski's journalistic objectivity prevents him from commenting critically on this, but it would be nice to know how he thinks such gender biases affect Africa's economic underdevelopment. But these deficiencies are minor. I HIGHLY recommend this book to anyone wanting to learn more about Africa and Africans, anyone willing to have their views of the world challenged, and anyone seeking a great adventure story.
Rating: 
Summary: A writer who has lost his way
Review: When it was discovered that Janet Cooke, a Washington Post reporter, had made up a harrowing account of the life of a young inner city drug addict, she was promptly sacked. Ryszard Kapuscinksi, the Polish journalist who seems to have regularly escaped death on his many of his assignments, takes what might kindly be called liberties with the reality and wins acclaim. He has, the argument goes, revealed inner truths apparently not accessible to other journalists who use more conventional techniques. This may be the case with some of his earlier books, but his latest work, The Shadow of the Sun, is a seldom revealing, and often mundane, account of his travels in Africa. This does not deter the publisher from making some foolish claims on Mr Kapuscinksi's behalf, including the assertion that Shadow of the Sun provides "first hand accounts of the main political events in Africa over nearly half a century". The 325 page book does not, however, have anything to say about the end of white rule in southern Africa. Nor does it have anything profound to say about Tanzania, where Mr Kapuscinski was based at one stage in his career as a reporter for the Polish news agency. Tanzania was the country which saw the compulsory relocation of millions of farmers and their families as former president Julius Nyerere pursued his disastrous vision of African socialism. In the book itself, some of the "facts" are wrong, such as the extraordinary claim that before the second world war the "inhabitants of Africa were not permitted to travel to Europe". If readers want fiction which provides insight into Africa's plight, read VS Naipaul's Bend in the River. If they want fact, read Blaine Harden - formerly of the Washington Post - Despatches from a Fragile Continent. It is far from clear what Mr Kapuscinski thinks he is offering. A distinguished reporter has used his old notebooks as a guide to a complex continent, but this time he has lost his way.
Rating:
Summary: An Insider's View of Africa
Review: When Kapuscinski was assigned to Africa in the 50's, he didn't have the money to live in tonier abodes. He lived with the natives and used native transport, and regularly got robbed in the process. As the London Times noted in its 7/8/01 review of this book, what seemed like a real disadvantage at the time turned itno a blessing because Kapuscinski got the real "inside story." Marry that to his awesome narrative skills and you have this book -- which *sings.*P.S. I don't know what rope M. Holman (Amazon reviewer) was smoking when he dissed this book, but it must have been a tough one. One star? C'mon, Holman, get real.
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