A review by jessica_irving
Shah of Shahs by Ryszard Kapuściński

4.0

I feel almost blasphemous not giving this five stars as my experience so far of reading Ryszard Kapuściński has been really, really great. There are some incredible chapters here and his prose is as usual acrobatic, building sickening dread through a nonlinear narrative of snapshots. I’ve seen someone else here describe his writing as overly ‘flowery’ but I adore it. His raw insights into the nature of terror on the individual and collective human psyche and dictatorship structures are as usual utterly original - I was pencil underlining furiously.

However, while I learned a lot even in a small number of pages, I still felt confused on the overall timeline of events, as key events were missing or only sparsely treated. I would also have loved to know more about the hostage crisis than one sentence.