Writer Ryszard Kapuscinski: an optimist in the heart of darkness.

• Author: Zalewski, Tomasz
• Position: Obituary

The word "charisma" is much overused these days, but in the case of Ryszard Kapuscinski it fits perfectly. By the time of his death last year at 74, the Polish reporter and non-fiction writer Kapuscinski had developed a worldwide following for his work, gaining an international stature unrivaled by any other journalist from central Europe. As a person, he also radiated warmth and love for people--not only those he studied and wrote about but also individuals he met and mentored in the course of his distinguished career.

For almost 30 years, he was a roving foreign correspondent for the state-run Polish Press Agency, witnessing scores of revolutions and coups. Delving deep beneath the headlines, his writings brought unique immediacy to the Third World's sufferings and dictatorships, wars and revolutions. For readers in Europe and North America, his vivid, telling reportage conveyed a tangible reality about life among people struggling for daily survival in dire conditions far removed from anything in the contemporary West. This quality made international bestsellers of his books, starting with The Emperor and The Soccer War (1978)--translated into 30 languages--and subsequent books such as The Shah of Shahs (1982) and The Shadow of the Sun (1998). Named Poland's "journalist of the century," his writings were widely recognized as work that went far beyond the "first draft of history," as is commonly said of journalism. In fact, they had compelling literary value, and Kapuscinski was several times put into consideration for the Nobel Prize in literature.

The American and European public might have wondered how an author from Poland--at that time a communist, Soviet-dominated country--understood so well the plight of the impoverished Southern hemisphere. After all, it seems to be a realm better known to Westerners, particularly from countries with an imperial past, such as Great Britain, which produced great storytellers who immortalized the colonial world: Rudyard Kipling, Graham Greene or E.M. Forster. Poland has never been a colonial power, of course. (It has had enough trouble defending its own space in Europe.) But Kapuscinski was able to penetrate these exotic places partly because he was a product, not of the imperial nations, but of a 20th-century country that, in his time, was similar in crucial respects to the "other" world he was describing.

Kapuscinski grew up in one of the poorest regions in the poorest part of east Poland, in the...