The Polish journalist whose The Soccer War and The Emperor are counted asclassics of contemporary reportage now bears witness in Imperium to thedisintegration of the Soviet Union. This magisterial book combineschildhood memory with unblinking journalism, a radar for the truth with akeen appreciation of the absurd. Imperium begins with Ryszard Kapuscinski's account of the Sovietoccupation of his town in eastern Poland in 1939. It culminates fiftyyears later, with a forty-thousand-mile journey that takes him from thehaunted corridors of the Kremlin to the abandoned gulag of Kolyma, from aminers' strike in the arctic circle to a panic-stricken bus ride throughthe war-torn Caucasus. Out of passivity and paranoia, ethnic hatred and religious fanaticismthat have riven two generations of Eastern Europeans, Kapuscinski hascomposed a symphony for a collapsing empire—a work that translateshistory into the hopes and sufferings of the human beings condemned tolive it.