R.I.P. Ryszard Kapuscinski

I know this bit of news isn't very Korea-related (actually, it isn't at all related to Korea), but yet another of my favorite authors has passed on and I feel like honoring him in my own little way here. Ryszard Kapuscinski was perhaps the most relevant journalist of the twentieth century, spending most of his long career covering some of the most important, yet undereported, events at the end of the most world's most tumultuous century. For years, he was the sole Polish reporter in all of Africa, one of the only journalists who could claim to have an entire continent as his beat. I read "Shadows of the Sun," a collection of stories about his time in Africa, while I was in college and it made me want to learn Polish (I never did though) because the writing was so beautiful in English that I could only imagine what it must be like in his first language. My undergraduate Politics professor regularly assigned "Shah of Shahs," Kapuscinski's account of the 1979 Iranian revolution, as a reading for his "Revolution and Political Violence" course. Unfortunately, I am having some trouble finding a good obituary on-line, so here is a link to the BBC story where I heard the news. Certainly, the era of journalistic curiousity, intergrity, and relevance that Kapuscinski was a part of has, sadly, long since passed, although I hope it will return one day.