Imperium Paperback - 1995

Media reviews

The Soccer War

"Kapuscinski is the conjuror extraordinary of modern reportage. The soccer War is a splendid example of his magic."

-- John Le Carre

"Here is perhaps the most essential of the century's figures -- the wandering dissident, who is always on the side of emancipation but who has had to find a way of getting his point not only past the censors but into the indifferent skulls of the readers as well."

-- Christopher Hitchens, New York Newsday

Shah Of Shahs

"[This] is a book of great economy and power. It has its author's skill with vivid imagery, a breathless way of writing that carries the reader along, a supreme sense of the absurd."

Fouad Ajami, The New Republic

"Kapuscinski's last book was The Emperor, a superb evocation of the decay of Haile Selassie's court. Now he has written an equally evocative description of the end of the Shah of Iran. It is wonderful."

-- William Shawcross

The Emperor

Kapuscinski's writing, always wonderfully concrete and observant, conjures marvels of meaning out of minutiae. And his book transcends reportage, becoming a nightmare of power...that reads as if Italo Calvino had rewritten Machiavelli...An unforgettable, fiercely comic, and finally compassionate book."

-- Salman Rushdie

"Kapuscinski has delivered to us what may be the last message from a time when societies did not change... [A] sensitive, powerful, and surprisingly merciful book."

-- Neal Ascherson, The New York Review of Books