Ryszard Kapuscinski (1932–2007) has become one of the renowned figures of modern journalism. His work cuts across the genres of war reporting, travel writing, and memoir. He has been called a “literary journalist” because of his lapidary prose. As a young man he aspired to be a poet; as the master of eyewitness history he became a credible candidate for the Nobel Prize. But towards the end of his life, doubts arose about the veracity of his dispatches from Africa and Latin America, and about his role in the apparat that forced Poland into the Soviet imperium.

Arthur Domoslawski probes every aspect of Kapuscinski: the man, the writer, and the mentor. Domoslawski knew Kapuscinski and this proximity strengthens the biographer’s narrative, allowing him to measure his own memories against those of his subject’s sister, friends, and associates. I cannot say enemies, since Kapuscinski really had none. Indeed, one of this biography’s chapters is titled “Why Did Kapuscinski Have No Critics in Poland?” It was only very late in the day—really only as Kapuscinski lay dying—that the monumental authority he had accrued in his native land began to be challenged.

How Kapuscinski acquired such a hallowed reputation is the burden of the biographer’s narrative. Domoslawski suggests that, like many greater writers, Kapuscinski began to fashion a persona at