Ryszard Kapuscinski, _The Soccer War_

Does anyone remember the Readers' Subscription? Google does not, it seems. It was a books-by-mail service like Book of the Month Club, with a more selective, intellectual bent. The original version was founded in the 1950s--Auden was involved--and petered out in the early 1970s. It was revived in the 1980s, which is when I joined, but it did long survive the advent of Amazon.

Anyway...I picked this book up via Readers' Subscription, over twenty-five years ago (it appeared in 1991, so I presumably ordered it in 1991 or 1992), and it has simply sat on a shelf ever since. I buy books always intending to read them, but sometimes that crucial trigger that gets it off the shelf and into my hands is wanting.

The book went undisturbed even when Kapuscinski died in 2007 (writers' deaths often spur me to at long last read them).

Then, a few years after he died, there was a blizzard of controversy: debates over whether Kapuscinski's journalism contained some admixture of of "improvement," or outright invention, or just plain fiction. Had he been lucky, this development might have cemented his literary reputation (apparently, he was shortlisted for the Nobel at least once), but it seems it has instead lowered his stock considerably. It's been a while since I've encountered his name, I know. I came close to giving up on the idea that I would ever read the book--almost sold it to used book store once or twice.

So why did I finally read it? I will spare you the full details, but as part of a post-op therapy, I find myself sitting immobilized for fifteen minutes every morning. I could just read the paper, I suppose, but instead I have resorted to a designated therapy book that I read in 15-minute installments, every blessed day. For this purpose, books I have always been curious about, but have no urgent reason to read, and can read without feeling obliged to pay close attention to, are just the thing. So my Kapuscinski moment finally arrived.

And he is as amazing as everyone said. His ability to summon up a scene from an unfamiliar part of the world is like that of Conrad but without the heavy hand of the symbolism, or that of Naipaul, but without the condescension. Many of the pieces were written in Africa during the struggles over decolonization (including a quick, vivid portrait of Lumumba), but there are also several from Latin America (including the title piece, which ought to be a film). Kapuscinski always conveys intelligence, humanity, a kind of dogged, Sam Spade style hope.

That not every scene nor every quoted speech may have been exactly what went down did not, I found, much bother me.

By the way, you'd be surprised how much you can get read in fifteen quiet morning minutes a day, every day. I'm already a third of the way through Ben Fountain's Beautiful Country, Burn Again.