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    Imperium

    Part of Vintage International

    Author Ryszard Kapuscinski
    Look inside
    $20.00 US
    Knopf | Vintage
    24 per carton
    On sale Aug 08, 1995 | 9780679747802
    Sales rights: US, Canada, Open Mkt
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    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.
    FIRST ENCOUNTERS (1939–1967)
    Pinsk
    The Trans-Siberian
    The South

    FROM A BIRD'S-EYE VIEW (1989–1991)
    The Third Rome
    The Temple and the Palace
    We Look, We Cry
    The Man on the Asphalt Mountain
    Fleeing from Oneself
    Vorkuta—to Freeze in Fire
    Tomorrow, the Revolt of the Bashkirs
    Russian Mystery Play
    Jumping over Puddles
    Kolyma, Fog and More Fog
    The Kremlin: The Magic Mountain
    The Trap
    Central Asia—the Destruction of the Sea
    Pomona of the Little Town of Drohobych
    Return to My Hometown

    THE SEQUEL CONTINUES (1992–1993)
    The Sequel Continues
    "Kapuscinski is a transcendental journalist. . . . He begins with appearances, for which he has uncommon gifts of poetry, irony and paradox, and clambers down them into essences. . . .He is writing about the whale from inside its belly."
    —Los Angeles Times

    "Kapuscinski is an enchanting guide, combining boundless stamina, felicitous writing, childish curiosity and the literate authority of a true intellectual. . . . There are treasures in this book. . . .It is a triumphant combination of bleak history and black comedy."
    —The New York Times Book Review

    "When our children's children want to study the cruelties of the late twentieth century . . . when they wonder why revolution after revolution betrayed its promises hrough greed, fear and confusion, they should read Ryszard Kapuscinski."
    —Wall Street Journal

    "A compelling and convincing narrative that examines the extensive damage done to entire nations, the human psyche and the physical environment....This is a devastating picture of Russia [that] penetrates deeply into the depressing truths of 70 years of Soviet rule, the borders, the fear, the inhumanity.... His portrait of the 'Imperium' is tragic, but ever so true."
    —Professor Thomas R. Beyer, Jr., Middlebury College, The Boston Globe

    About

    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.

    Table of Contents

    FIRST ENCOUNTERS (1939–1967)
    Pinsk
    The Trans-Siberian
    The South

    FROM A BIRD'S-EYE VIEW (1989–1991)
    The Third Rome
    The Temple and the Palace
    We Look, We Cry
    The Man on the Asphalt Mountain
    Fleeing from Oneself
    Vorkuta—to Freeze in Fire
    Tomorrow, the Revolt of the Bashkirs
    Russian Mystery Play
    Jumping over Puddles
    Kolyma, Fog and More Fog
    The Kremlin: The Magic Mountain
    The Trap
    Central Asia—the Destruction of the Sea
    Pomona of the Little Town of Drohobych
    Return to My Hometown

    THE SEQUEL CONTINUES (1992–1993)
    The Sequel Continues

    Praise

    "Kapuscinski is a transcendental journalist. . . . He begins with appearances, for which he has uncommon gifts of poetry, irony and paradox, and clambers down them into essences. . . .He is writing about the whale from inside its belly."
    —Los Angeles Times

    "Kapuscinski is an enchanting guide, combining boundless stamina, felicitous writing, childish curiosity and the literate authority of a true intellectual. . . . There are treasures in this book. . . .It is a triumphant combination of bleak history and black comedy."
    —The New York Times Book Review

    "When our children's children want to study the cruelties of the late twentieth century . . . when they wonder why revolution after revolution betrayed its promises hrough greed, fear and confusion, they should read Ryszard Kapuscinski."
    —Wall Street Journal

    "A compelling and convincing narrative that examines the extensive damage done to entire nations, the human psyche and the physical environment....This is a devastating picture of Russia [that] penetrates deeply into the depressing truths of 70 years of Soviet rule, the borders, the fear, the inhumanity.... His portrait of the 'Imperium' is tragic, but ever so true."
    —Professor Thomas R. Beyer, Jr., Middlebury College, The Boston Globe

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