New Releases by Ryszard Kapuscinski

Quien muchos consideran el mejor reportero del siglo, se sumerge en el continente africano, rehuyendo lugares comunes y estereotipos. Vive en las casas repletas de cucarachas de los más pobres, enferma de malaria cerebral, corre peligro de muerte a manos

This journalist''s portrait of life in Iran just after the Revolution is "a book of great economy and power [with] a supreme sense of the absurd" ( New Republic). Iran, 1980: the revolutionaries have taken charge. In a deserted Teheran hotel, Ryszard Kapuściński tries to make journalistic and human sense out of the mass of notes, tapes, and photographs he had accumulated during his extended stay in Iran. Just what happened and how? What did Khomeini have to offer that the Shah, who promised to "create a second America within a generation," did not? Where did the revolution come from, and where is it going? After all this blood has been spilled, what has it given its people or the world? "We have given [the world] poetry, the miniature, and carpets," says a rug merchant in Teheran. "We have given the world this miraculous, Unique uselessness." Kapuściński tells a rich story that combines factual reporting with his own impressions and reflections. Always engrossing and frequently revelatory, it is a unique portrait of the psychological state of a country in revolution.

This account of the rise and fall of Ethiopian emperor Haile Selassie is "an unforgettable, fiercely comic, and finally compassionate book" (Salman Rushdie, Man Booker Prize–winning author). After Haile Selassie was deposed in 1974, Ryszard Kapuściński—Poland''s top foreign correspondent—went to Ethiopia to piece together a firsthand account of how the emperor governed his country, and why he finally fell from power. At great risk to himself, Kapuściński interviewed members of the imperial circle who had gone into hiding. The result is this remarkable book, in which Selassie''s servants and closest associates share accounts—humorous, frightening, sad, grotesque—of a man living amidst nearly unimaginable pomp and luxury while his people teetered between hunger and starvation. It is a classic portrait of authoritarianism, and a fascinating story of a forty-four-year reign that ended with a coup d''état in 1974.