Pocket Book Review # 1

The Soccer War, by Ryszard Kapuscinski



From 1958 to 1980 Kapuscinski was the Polish Press Agency's correspondent in Africa and Central and South America. He flew from one crisis to the next, a literary man with a journalist's notebook, reporting on wars and revolutions, profiling political leaders, revolutionaries, and madmen, and living with the common people in their tin houses on their ramshackle streets.

The Soccer War is a collection of reports from Kapuscinki's far-flung travels, interspersed with soaring diary entries styled, whimsically, "Plan for a Book That Could Have Started Right Here," "Plan for a Book That Could Have Been Written," "Plan for a Book That Will Never Be Written," etc. It's touches like these that make Kapuscinski's essays so special. He writes about tragedy, but never loses his sense of the beauty and absurdity of the world.

It's a Vintage paperback. $14. You cannot go wrong.