Book Condition: Near Fine. Originally published: London : Pan, 1987. Language note: Translated from the Polish. Dimensions: 5.1 x 0.4 x 7.8 inches. Weight: 4.2 ounces. 'This is a very personal book, about being alone and lost'. In 1975 Kapuscinski's employers sent him to Angola to cover the civil war that had broken out after independence. For months he watched as Luanda and then the rest of the country collapsed into a civil war that was in the author's words 'sloppy, dogged and cruel'. In his account, Kapuscinski demonstrates an extraordinary capacity to describe and to explain the individual meaning of grand political abstractions. This is a fine, fine piece of tightly written war reportage. From the first page the heat, tension, cruelty and fear of the Angola civil war following Portugese decolonisation is brought to life by Kapuscinski's biscuit dry prose. He was not one of these sit back and learn of events from a distance whilst sipping fine malt whisky journalists. He bore right into the heart of the action, frequently risking his life. Some of the stories in here are highly strung in terms of tension, wit and emotion. Take the encounter with the security post, where you have a choice of two greetings to shout to the guards, the wrong one will result in death, and garbling a half sounding equivocation doesn't cut it. Also the heartbreaking sacrifice by a Mulatto girl who stays behind and is killed after Kapuscinski's truck leaves. Kapuscinski died very recently, he was one of those rare and brave Europeans who finds the intellectual life of Western Europe (though he was actually Polish) lax, self satisfied and bland, and sought to find places where life really was lived with every emotional and sensory dial turned up high. Another Day of Life is a very apt title.
+
