Autorentext
Ryszard Kapuscinski was born in 1932 in Pinsk in eastern Poland and educated in Warsaw. His first book, The Polish Bush, which reported from the Polish 'frontier', appeared in 1962 and was an immediate best-seller. He travelled widely throughout the Third World as a foreign correspondent, storing up, as he once said in an interview, the experiences for the books that would come later. The first of these books, published in 1968, was based on a journey through Islamic Russia. This was followed by books on Africa, Latin America and South Africa. His first book to be translated into English was The Emperor, based on the last days of Haile Selassie. His other books in English include Another Day of Life, about the war in Angola, and Shah of Shahs, about the revolution in Iran. He is also the author of the highly acclaimed Imperium, the story of his travels across the dying empire of the Soviet Union in 1989, which is also published by Granta Books. Ryszard Kapuscinski died in Warsaw in January 2007 at the age of seventy-four. Klara Glowczewska holds a B.A. degree in English, Magna Cum Laude, from Yale College. Born in Warsaw, Poland, and raised in Raleigh, North Carolina, Cairo, Egypt, and New Canaan, Connecticut, Glowczewka speaks three languages, including French and Polish. She lives in New York City.

Klappentext
A remarkable and moving history of the Soviet Union told through the people who lived through it. 'The most passionate, engaging and historically profound account of the Soviet empire that I have read' Michael Ignatieff Imperium is the story of an empire: the constellation of states that was submerged under a single identity for most of the twentieth century - the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. From the arrival of Soviet troops into his hometown in Poland in 1939, to just before the Berlin Wall came down, as the USSR convulsed and died, Kapuscinski travelled thousands of miles and talked to hundreds of ordinary Soviet people about their extraordinary lives and the terror from which they were emerging. It is a classic of reportage and a literary masterwork by one of the great writers and witnesses of the twentieth century. 'Enchanting... 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 through greed, fear and confusion, they should read Ryszard Kapuscinski' Wall Street Journal

Zusammenfassung
'The most passionate, engaging and historically profound account of the Soviet empire that I have read.' - Michael Ignatieff