' This is a very personal book about being alone & lost' In 1975 Kapuscinski's employers sent him to Angola to cover the civil war that had broken out after independence For months he watched as Luanda & then the rest of the country collapsed into a civil war that was in the author's words 'sloppy dogged & cruel' In his account Kapuscinski demonstrates an extraordinary capacity to describe & to explain the individual meaning of grand political abstractions