Soccer War

In 1964, renowned reporter Ryszard Kapuscinski was appointed by the Polish Press Agency as its only foreign correspondent, and for the next ten years he was 'responsible' for fifty countries. He befriended Che Guevara in Bolivia, Salvador Allende in Chile and Patrice Lumumba in the Congo. He reported on the fighting that broke out between Honduras and El Salvador in 1969 after their matches to determine which one of them would qualify for the 1970 World Cup. By the time, he returned to Poland he had witnessed twenty-seven revolutions and coups and been sentenced to death four times. "The Soccer War" is Kapuscinski's story, his eyewitness account of the emergence of the Third World. * 'Part-diary, part-documentary account of the twenty years in which Kapuscinski make the telex machines chatter with his unique reportage, his datelines forming a gazetter of the world's trouble spots' Sunday Telegraph *'In this book you learn what it feels like to have benzene poured over you by someone who is about to set you alight. You feel very cold indeed' James Fenton, Independent on Sunday *'As rich and strange as anything in Marquez' Guardian