The Heir to Kapuscinski

Like the full moon at its glowing peak or the perfectly timed arrival of a train, David Samuels catches that elusive synergistic lightning in a bottle in his conversation with Wojciech Jagielski. Here’s some of the background on Jagielski.

Over the last decade, the species of foreign reporting in which Jagielski was mentored by his hero, the legendary Polish reporter and writer Ryszard Kapuscinski, has largely been replaced by cheap, high-speed opinion-mongering on the Internet. One of the few welcome results of this development is that Towers of Stone, Jagielski’s stunning account of the Chechen wars, and The Night Wanderers, his book about the child soldiers of Joseph Kony’s Lord’s Resistance Army, are now available in English translations from Seven Stories Press. Hopefully, Jagielski’s account of the Afghan wars, based on his 11 trips to Afghanistan between 1992 and 2001, will also soon be translated into English.

Now read the rest here.