Another Day of Life - Ryszard Kapuscinski

'Angola . . . the last months of Portuguese rule and the dramatic days of the transfer of power. Factions fight for power, the South Africans invade to install their protgs, the Cubans land to prop up theirs. Guerrillas, refugees, spies and the lonely reporter who had run out of money for food weeks before, connected to the outside world by one vulnerable telex line. Kapuscinski is in the thick of it. He goes to the front line, flies to isolated garrisons, makes it in a truck across hundreds of miles of hostile bush . . . he has a good eye for the specific, the gesture, the phrase, the universal expressed through the particular' Sunday Times 'The book seems informed by the novelist's eye rather then the journalist's. It might be a product of a Graham Greene or a V. S. Naipaul . . . fragmentary, anecdotal and impressionistic. This idiosyncratic eye, and the laconic, candid way its observations are recorded are what make Another Day of Life so memorable. More important, the author pins down the nature of war in modern Africa, its particular terrors, lunacies and disasters. Mr Kapuscinski has captured this quite brilliantly. Throughout the book in the decaying surreal city or the tense journeys through the bush, one senses just how fragile is our sense of order, our idea of a comprehensible world' New York Times Book Review
'A fine reporter . . . Kapuscinski infiltrates each inferno with the weary knowledge that revolution if a dialogue between the bad and the worse. There are no solutions, only reports from the midnight of high noon' David Caute, Observer 'One Kapuscinski is worth a thousand grizzled journofantasists; and through his astonishing blend of reportage and artistry we get as close to what he calls the incommunicable image of war as we're ever likely to by reading. Ours is the most cryptic of centuries, its true nature a dark secret. Ryszard Kapuscinski is the kind of codebreaker we need' Salman Rushdie, Guardian.