About this ebook
This journalist’s portrait of life in Iran just after the Revolution is “a book of great economy and power [with] a supreme sense of the absurd” (New Republic).
Iran, 1980: the revolutionaries have taken charge. In a deserted Teheran hotel, Ryszard Kapuściński tries to make journalistic and human sense out of the mass of notes, tapes, and photographs he had accumulated during his extended stay in Iran. Just what happened and how? What did Khomeini have to offer that the Shah, who promised to “create a second America within a generation,” did not? Where did the revolution come from, and where is it going? After all this blood has been spilled, what has it given its people or the world? “We have given [the world] poetry, the miniature, and carpets,” says a rug merchant in Teheran. “We have given the world this miraculous, Unique uselessness.”
Kapuściński tells a rich story that combines factual reporting with his own impressions and reflections. Always engrossing and frequently revelatory, it is a unique portrait of the psychological state of a country in revolution.
Iran, 1980: the revolutionaries have taken charge. In a deserted Teheran hotel, Ryszard Kapuściński tries to make journalistic and human sense out of the mass of notes, tapes, and photographs he had accumulated during his extended stay in Iran. Just what happened and how? What did Khomeini have to offer that the Shah, who promised to “create a second America within a generation,” did not? Where did the revolution come from, and where is it going? After all this blood has been spilled, what has it given its people or the world? “We have given [the world] poetry, the miniature, and carpets,” says a rug merchant in Teheran. “We have given the world this miraculous, Unique uselessness.”
Kapuściński tells a rich story that combines factual reporting with his own impressions and reflections. Always engrossing and frequently revelatory, it is a unique portrait of the psychological state of a country in revolution.
About the author
Ryszard Kapuściński (1932–2007) was born in eastern Poland. After studying Polish history at Warsaw University, he began work as a domestic reporter. Later, as a foreign correspondent for the Polish Press Agency (until 1981), Kapuściński gained critical and popular praise for his coverage of civil wars, revolutions, and social conditions in the Third World. In Latin America, Africa, and the Middle East, he ventured into the “bush”—the word that has become his trademark—to search out hidden stories. In addition to his books on the Third World, Kapuściński has written about the Polish provinces and the Asian and Caucasian republics of the Soviet Union. His account of the fall of Haile Selassie, The Emperor, was published to widespread acclaim in many languages. Newsweek named it one of the ten best books of 1983.
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