 | W.A.B.
Warsaw 2005
139 × 202
400 pages
paperback
ISBN 83-7414-114-X
Translation rights: W.A.B.
Rights sold to: Spain (Random House Mondadori/Debate) |
|
Wojciech JagielskiA Good Place To Die
Excerpt
"Gazeta Wyborcza" correspondent Wojciech Jagielski has already won acclaim for his reports on journeys to the world's worst trouble spots. A Good Place to Die only confirms this reputation.
At the time when the clear majority of reporters from all over the world were meeting up on the war front in former Yugoslavia, almost alone and unaided Jagielski was making a dangerous journey through another hellhole of frenzied nationalism, the Caucasus and Transcau-casian regions, a place where a hundred small nations, crammed in between two seas and three possessive, rival powers, namely Russia, Turkey and Iran, wage cruel and relentless wars against each other. These wars have divided people, inflamed hatred and set them against each other. "Once we used to go to each other's weddings and funerals. Now we just shoot at each other," says one of the characters in Jagielski's report.
The book is full of unusual descriptions, shocking images and some astounding data — for example, for each person killed 13,500 shots were fired, or that in exchange for one officer taken prisoner the other side gave 200 litres of petrol or five women hostages!
Jagielski shows all the contrasts, absurdities and dramas of contemporary history—he writes about how, in order to save Ingush independence, Chechnya declared independence without having its own state, and about how thanks to the war the patients in a lunatic asylum in Chermen began to live the life of normal people.
One of the people Jagielski encounters tells him that it is right there in Transcaucasia that the ultimate war will take place between European and Asian civilisation, between Christianity and Islam. In this man's view, it will be the last war ever fought.
Ryszard Kapuściński
Back |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
There are more than 31,000 publishers registered in Poland. However, the market is highly concentrated. The 300 largest publishing firms still hold almost 98 per cent of it. More »
|
|
|
|
