Imperium (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9780679747802)

The Polish journalist whose The Soccer War and The Emperor are counted as classics of contemporary reportage now bears witness in Imperium to the disintegration of the Soviet Union. This magisterial book combines childhood memory with unblinking journalism, a radar for the truth with a keen appreciation of the absurd.

Imperium begins with Ryszard Kapuscinski's account of the Soviet occupation of his town in eastern Poland in 1939. It culminates fifty years later, with a forty-thousand-mile journey that takes him from the haunted corridors of the Kremlin to the abandoned gulag of Kolyma, from a miners' strike in the arctic circle to a panic-stricken bus ride through the war-torn Caucasus.

Out of passivity and paranoia, ethnic hatred and religious fanaticism that have riven two generations of Eastern Europeans, Kapuscinski has composed a symphony for a collapsing empire--a work that translates history into the hopes and sufferings of the human beings condemned to live it.

Author: Ryszard Kapuscinski
ISBN-10: 067974780X
ISBN-13: 9780679747802
Publisher: Vintage
Language: English
Published: 08/08/1995
Pages: 352
Format: Paperback
Weight: 0.55lbs
Size: 8.18h x 5.16w x 0.77d

Review Citation(s):
Publishers Weekly 07/17/1995