This book focuses on musical writings in the daily and periodical press in France during the nineteenth century. It covers the criticism of a wide range of Western music, from c. 1580 to 1880, explaining how composers such as Bach and Beethoven secured a permanent place in the repertory. In particular, Dr Ellis considers the music journalism of the Revue et Gazette musicale de Paris, the single most important specialist periodical of the mid nineteenth century, explaining how French music criticism was influenced by aesthetic and philosophical movements. Dr Ellis analyses the process of canon formation, the development of French musicology and the increasing sensitivity of critics to questions of performance practice. Chapters on new music examine the conflict, inevitable in publishers' journals, between commercial interest and aesthetic integrity.

In The Future is History Masha Gessen follows the lives of four Russians, born as the Soviet Union crumbled, at what promised to be the dawn of democracy. Each came of age with unprecedented expectations, some as the children or grandchildren of the very architects of the new Russia, each with newfound aspirations of their own - as entrepreneurs, activists, thinkers and writers, sexual and social beings. Gessen charts their paths not only against the machinations of the regime that would seek to crush them all (censorship, intimidation, violence) but also against the war it waged on understanding itself, ensuring the unobstructed emergence of the old Soviet order in the form of today's terrifying and seemingly unstoppable mafia state. The Future is History is a powerful and urgent cautionary tale by contemporary Russia's most fearless inquisitor.

A TLS and a Prospect Book of the Year A revelatory, explosive new analysis of the military today. Over the first two decades of the twenty-first century the British Army fought in Iraq and Afghanistan, at considerable financial and human cost. Yet neither war achieved its objectives. Award-winning journalist Simon Akam questions why, and provides challenging but necessary answers. Composed from assiduous documentary research, field reportage, and hundreds of interviews, this book is a strikingly rich, nuanced portrait of one of our pivotal national institutions in a time of great stress. This is as much a book about Britain, and about the politics of failure, as it is about the military.

In the magazine world, no recognition is more highly coveted or prestigious than a National Magazine Award. Annually, members of the American Society of Magazine Editors, in association with the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, select the year's most dynamic, original, provocative, and influential magazine stories. The winning and finalist pieces in this anthology represent outstanding work by some of the most eminent writers in America as well as rising literary and journalistic talents. This prestigious collection includes stories that cover a variety of subjects from Elizabeth Kolbert's investigation into global warming in the "New Yorker" and James Bamford's look at the PR campaign behind the Iraq War in "Rolling Stone" to Chris Heath's remarkable profile of Merle Haggard in "GQ" and Bill Heavey's hilarious account of teaching his daughter to fish in "Field and Stream." Other writers include David Foster Wallace ( "The Atlantic Monthly"), Joyce Carol Oates ( "The Virginia Quarterly Review"), Priscilla Long ( "The American Scholar"), Jesse Katz ( "Los Angeles Magazine"), Marjorie Williams ( "Vanity Fair"), Hendrik Hertzberg ( "New Yorker"), Sven Birkerts ( "The Virginia Quarterly Review"), Erik Reece ( "Harper's"), Wendy Brenner ( "The Oxford American"), John Jeremiah Sullivan ( "GQ"), James Wolcott ( "Vanity Fair"), and Wyatt Mason ( "Harper's").

Wide-ranging in their style and subjects, these writers' stories inform, surprise, entertain, and provide new perspectives on our world. They also reflect elements that distinguish the best in magazine writing: moral passion, investigative zeal, vivid characters and settings, persistent reporting, and artful writing.

Erholungsangebote fur den harten Alltag im Nationalsozialismus? Fluchtfahrzeuge fur Eskapisten? Oder doch erfolgreiche Instrumente der Integration und Propaganda? Produkte einer modernen Popularkultur waren bis 1945 zentraler Bestandteil des Alltags im 'Dritten Reich'. Auch wenn die Nationalsozialisten diese Kultur zumindest in Teilen von ideologischer Warte aus scharf kritisierten, forcierten sie den Ausbau einer auf Massenkonsum orientierten Kulturindustrie; zugleich versuchten sie freilich, deren Produkte zu beeinflussen und zu bestimmen. Literatur- und Medienwissenschaftler sowie Historiker verorten in diesem Band u. a. Tierfilme, Science-Fiction, Arztromane und popularwissenschaftliche Zeitschriften im Kultur- und Propagandabetrieb des 'Dritten Reiches'. Sie analysieren die Versuche zur Formierung der Unterhaltungsliteratur, beleuchten Phanomene wie die Inszenierung von Volksgemeinschaft im Fussballfilm, Theatertourneen fur die Arbeiter der Reichsautobahn sowie die Prasenz von Blondinen und anderen Popularmythen in Propagandaflugblattern. Biographische Fallstudien beschaftigen sich mit der Stellung von Autoren wie Hans Dominik, Ernst Kreuder, Hans Fallada und Erich Kastner in der NS-Kulturindustrie. Die Beitrage zeigen, wie weit sich Nationalsozialismus und gute Unterhaltung miteinander kombinieren lassen. Sie zeigen aber auch, wo diese Verbindung an die Grenzen der Logik einer kapitalistisch organisierten Kulturproduktion stoesst bzw. mit den ideologischen Anspruchen einer Diktatur kollidiert.

Victorian culture was dominated by an ever expanding world of print. A tremendous increase in the volume of books, newspapers, and periodicals, was matched by the corresponding development of the first mass reading public. It has long been acknowledged that the growth of the popular publishing industry played an instrumental role in the success of most major Victorian novelists. Traditional critical positions have, nevertheless, recently expanded into a much broader field concerned with media history, book studies, modes of textual production and consumption, and concepts of "popular literature." One of most notable current critical trends is a renewed interest in the importance of all aspects of nineteenth-century print culture.
Victorian Print Media: A Reader collects primary sources from nineteenth century journals, newspapers, and periodicals into an anthology that can be used for teaching purposes, but is also intended to complement and encourage ongoing research. The extracts are organized into ten thematically arranged sections. Each section addresses a specific conceptual or historical issue, such as the impact of serial publication upon practices of reading and authorship. The sections demonstrate the multiple factors upon which the aesthetics of print media depended, making this anthology of use to all researchers, teachers, and students of the period.

Daily Maverick, the country’s leading online news service, has been making sense of the madness that is South African reality for the past five years. Brain Porn offers the best of their irreverent writing. These superbly written essays offer insight into not only the wheeling and dealing that goes on in politics, but also into our societal dynamics and why we get up to the crazy things we sometimes do as a nation. Whether you’re a news junkie or just want to hold your own over lunchtime conversation, you can’t afford not to read this book.

China's 'Great Firewall' has evolved into the most sophisticated system of online censorship in the world. As the Chinese internet grows and online businesses thrive, speech is controlled, dissent quashed, and attempts to organise outside the official Communist Party are quickly stamped out. Updated throughout and available in paperback for the first time, The Great Firewall of China draws on James Griffiths' unprecedented access to the Great Firewall and the politicians, tech leaders, dissidents and hackers whose lives revolve around it. New chapters cover the suppression of information about the first outbreak of COVID-19 in Wuhan, disinformation campaigns in response to the exposure of the persecution of Uyghur communities in Xinjiang and the crackdown against the Umbrella movement in Hong Kong.

Ausgehend von allgemeinen stilistischen Regeln werden die verschiedenen journalistischen Gattungen (Meldung, Bericht, Reportage, Portrait, Kommentar, Feature, Glosse) in diesem Buch kritisch gepruft und die Charakteristika ausfuhrlich dargestellt. Ein weiterer Schwerpunkt liegt auf den Online-Medien und neuen journalistischen Formen wie Blogs. Mithilfe von praktischen Ubungen erlernen die LeserInnen die Grundregeln professioneller Textproduktion."

Chosen from the 2012 National Magazine Awards finalists and winners, this anthology is filled with compelling features and profiles, eye-opening reporting, and incisive criticism and analysis of contemporary culture and society. Written by today's leading journalists, the selections cover a range of developments in politics, international affairs, culture, and business -- from the increasingly short shelf lives of celebrity marriages to the ongoing fallout from Wall Street's financial malpractice, from the insidious effects of the lingering wars in Iraq and Afghanistan to the resurgent battle over issues pertaining to women's safety and health. Always engaging and informative, "Best American Magazine Writing 2012" is an incomparable resource for the most noteworthy journalism and literary achievements of the year.

Essays include Lawrence Wright ( "The New Yorker") on the history of Scientology and recent challenges to its mission and methods; Matthieu Aikins ( "The Atlantic") on the shady dealings and shifting sands of the war in Afghanistan; the late Christopher Hitchens ( "Vanity Fair") on the physical and emotional toll of cancer; and Joel Stein ( "Time") on the propensity for politicians and other popular figures to get into trouble on the Internet. John Jeremiah Sullivan ( "GQ") immerses himself in David Foster Wallace's curious legacy; Tim Crothers ( "ESPN") follows the inspiring story of Phiona Mutesi, a chess prodigy from the slums of Uganda; Chris Ballard ( "Sports Illustrated") recounts Dewayne Dedmon's struggle to reconcile his faith with a career in sports; Wesley Yang ( "New York") explores the pressure on Asian Americans to succeed and the psychological and cultural consequences when they don't; and Luke Dittrich ( "Esquire") shares the raw experiences of those who survived one of 2011's worst natural disasters: the tornado that hit Joplin, Missouri. The sparkling dialogue and vividly imagined, eccentric characters of Karen Russell's award-winning short story, "The Hox River Window" ( "Zoetrope: All-Story"), rounds out the collection.

As a photojournalist, Feni spends a lot of time photographing service delivery strikes and protest in the townships. Often the images that make it into the newspapers are only of the looting and burnings. Renting a backyard room in an informal settlement, Feni was troubled by this kind of portrayal of the lack of service delivery and the life of the marginalised.

As he says, “I live at the back of an RDP house in Mfuleni on the Cape Flats. I experience issues like poor sanitation, access to clean water and the flooding first hand”. Photographing the lack of sanitation was not pleasant for him, but he did not want a photographer from outside the community telling their stories while he watched on. “That too would be a Drain on Our Dignity and that’s what inspired this project”.

A Drain On Our Dignity echoes the ground-breaking images produced by Ernest Cole in the early 1960s, showing black life under apartheid. It is a sensitive and honest look at what lack of services is, what it does to a community and what it does to a people.

Without the screaming, fighting or burning – these captivating images compel the reader to look at what is happening in the Cape Town townships.

What does it feel like to be featured, quoted, or just named in a news story? A refugee family, the survivor of a shooting, a primary voter in Iowa-the views and experiences of ordinary people are an important component of journalism. While much has been written about how journalists work and gather stories, what do we discover about the practice of journalism and attitudes about the media by focusing on the experiences of the subjects themselves? In Becoming the News, Ruth Palmer argues that understanding the motivations and experiences of those who have been featured in news stories-voluntarily or not-sheds new light on the practice of journalism and the importance many continue to place on the role of the mainstream media. Based on dozens of interviews with news subjects, Becoming the News studies how ordinary people make sense of their experience as media subjects. Palmer charts the arc of the experience of "making" the news, from the events that brought an ordinary person to journalists' attention through the decision to cooperate with reporters, interactions with journalists, and reactions to the news coverage and its aftermath. She explores what motivates someone to talk to the press; whether they consider the potential risks; the power dynamics between a journalist and their subject; their expectations about the motivations of journalists; and the influence of social media on their decisions and reception. Pointing to the ways traditional news organizations both continue to hold on to and are losing their authority, Becoming the News has important implications for how we think about the production and consumption of news at a time when Americans distrust the news media more than ever.

Turkey is a land torn between East and West, and between its glorious past and a dangerous, unpredictable future. After the violence of an attempted military coup against President Erdogan in 2016, an event which shocked the world, journalist and novelist Kaya Genc travelled around his country on a quest to find the places and people in whom the contrasts of Turkey's rich past meet. As suicide bombers attack Istanbul, and journalists and teachers are imprisoned, he walks the streets of the famous Ottoman neighborhoods, and tells the stories of the ordinary Turks who live among the contradictions and conflicts of one of the world's great cities. The Lion and the Nightingale tells the spellbinding story of a country whose history has been split between East and West, between violence and beauty - between the roar of the lion and the song of the nightingale. Weaving together a mixture of memoir, interview and his own autobiography, Genc takes the reader on a contemporary journey through the contradictory soul of the Turkish nation.

Chosen by the American Society of Magazine Editors, the stories in this anthology include National Magazine Award-winning works of public interest, reporting, feature writing, and fiction. This year's selections include Pamela Colloff (Texas Monthly) on the agonizing, decades-long struggle by a convicted murderer to prove his innocence; Dexter Filkins (The New Yorker) on the emotional effort by an Iraq War veteran to make amends for the role he played in the deaths of innocent Iraqis; Chris Jones (Esquire) on Robert A. Caro's epic, ongoing investigation into the life and work of Lyndon Johnson; Charles C. Mann (Orion) on the odds of human beings' survival as a species; and Roger Angell (The New Yorker) on aging, dying, and loss. The former infantryman Brian Mockenhaupt (Byliner) describes modern combat in Afghanistan and its ability both to forge and challenge friendships; Ta-Nehisi Coates (The Atlantic) reflects on the complex racial terrain traversed by Barack Obama; Frank Rich (New York) assesses Mitt Romney's ambiguous candidacy; and Dahlia Lithwick (Slate) looks at the current and future implications of an eventful year in Supreme Court history. The volume also includes an interview on the art of screenwriting with Terry Southern from The Paris Review and an award-winning short story by Stephen King published in Harper's magazine.

This is the first time these essays have been collected and identified as De Quincey's. Each essay or article is reprinted with full annotation and the author's reasons for attributing it to De Quincey. The essays vary in length and in subject matter: some are addressed to "The Editor"; some are critical reviews of contemporary magazines; some are week-to-week political commentaries on issues facing the second Tory party. Together they show De Quincey, the journalist, working on a variety of subjects that occur in his writing before and after this time, from the financing of empires to an attack on Macaulay or an analysis of Burke's mind and style. Originally published in 1966. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

William Gilmore Simms (1806-1870) was a novelist, poet, and essayist and was considered the South's premier literary figure at the height of his popularity. No less an authority than Edgar Allen Poe remarked of Simms that "he has surpassed, we think, any of his countrymen" as a novelist. Simms's literary achievements include more than twenty major novels, several volumes of poetry, and biographies of important figures in American history. Perhaps the least considered parts of Simms's overall body of writings are those he did for newspapers, the most interesting of which are from the era of the Civil War and Reconstruction. Writing War and Reunion offers a selection of the best of those so that we can track Simms's thoughts about, and reactions to, the conflict, from its beginnings through to its conclusion and into the early years of Reconstruction. These works provide a valuable insight into how a prominent southern intellectual interpreted and participated in these momentous events in U.S. history. In the decades following the Civil War, Simms's reputation suffered a steady decline. Because of his associations with the antebellum South, slavery, and Confederate defeat, as well as changes in literary tastes, Simms came to be regarded as a talented but failed Southern author of a bygone era. Today a robust scholarly literature exists that has reexamined Simms, his literary works, and previous scholarly judgments and finds him to have been an important figure in the development of nineteenth-century American literature and worthy of serious study.

Reclaiming Kalakaua: Nineteenth-Century Perspectives on a Hawaiian Sovereign examines the American, international, and Hawaiian representations of David La'amea Kamanakapu Mahinulani Nalaiaehuokalani Lumialani Kalakaua in English- and Hawaiian-language newspapers, books, travelogues, and other materials published during his reign as Hawai'i's mo'i (sovereign) from 1874 to 1891. Beginning with an overview of Kalakaua's literary genealogy of misrepresentation, author Tiffany Lani Ing surveys the negative, even slanderous, portraits of him that have been inherited from his enemies who first sought to curtail his authority as mo'i through such acts as the 1887 Bayonet Constitution and who later tried to justify their parts in overthrowing the Hawaiian kingdom in 1893 and annexing it to the United States in 1898. A close study of contemporary international and American newspaper accounts and other narratives about Kalakaua, many highly favorable, results in a more nuanced and wide-ranging characterization of the mo'i as a public figure. Most importantly, virtually none of the existing nineteenth-, twentieth-, and twenty-first-century texts about Kalakaua consults contemporary Kanaka Maoli (Native Hawaiian) sentiment for him. Offering examples drawn from hundreds of nineteenth-century Hawaiian-language newspaper articles, mele (songs), and mo'olelo (histories, stories) about the mo'i, Reclaiming Kalakaua restores balance to our understanding of how he was viewed at the time-by his own people and the world. This important work shows that for those who did not have reasons for injuring or trivializing Kalakaua's reputation as mo'i, he often appeared to be the antithesis of our inherited understanding. The mo'i struck many, and above all his own people, as an intelligent, eloquent, compassionate, and effective Hawaiian leader.

This is the first time these essays have been collected and identified as De Quincey's. Each essay or article is reprinted with full annotation and the author's reasons for attributing it to De Quincey. The essays vary in length and in subject matter: some are addressed to "The Editor"; some are critical reviews of contemporary magazines; some are week-to-week political commentaries on issues facing the second Tory party. Together they show De Quincey, the journalist, working on a variety of subjects that occur in his writing before and after this time, from the financing of empires to an attack on Macaulay or an analysis of Burke's mind and style. Originally published in 1966. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

The "Baltimore Sun" covered World War II with an outstanding team of combat correspondents, among them three future Pulitzer Prize winners. The correspondents witnessed momentous events: Anzio and Cassino, D-Day, Black Christmas in the Bulge, the crossing of the Rhine, the link up with the Russians on the Elbe, the German surrender at Rheims, the invasions of Iwo Jima and Okinawa, and the Japanese surrender on the U.S.S. "Missouri."

They took enormous risks. Price Day was in action at Anzio and Cassino; Holbrook Bradley landed with the 29th Division on the Normandy beaches. Lee McCardell narrowly escaped death when a bomb exploded near his jeep. Howard Norton was on a sub chaser when a Japanese shell killed most of its crew. Philip Heisler's escort carrier nearly capsized in a typhoon.

They filed stories from the front lines of history. Norton scooped the world on the execution of Mussolini. Day and McCardell were among the first to file stories on Nazi atrocities and death camps. The doyen of these correspondents, Mark Watson, wrote prescient articles on military strategy. All of them sent back gritty stories of the endurance and humor of ordinary GIs.

This was a time when correspondents wore uniforms, censors could block their stories, and journalists wrote on portable typewriters and traveled dozens of miles to file their copy. Enjoying a personal freedom of movement and decision-making unknown in today's electronic era, these newspaper men were working at a time when print journalism was the prime medium for news. Their dispatches, which reported the war with the immediacy of real time, make up the core of this book.

Elizabeth Hardwick's iconic essay collection Seduction and Betrayal is a radical portrait of women and literature, reissued with a new introduction by Deborah Levy.

'Hardwick's sentences are burned in my brain.' - Susan Sontag

Sidelined. Betrayed. Killed off. Elizabeth Hardwick dissects the history of women and literature.

In her most virtuoso work of criticism, she explores the lives of the Brontës, Woolf, Eliot and Plath; the fate of literary wives such as Zelda Fitzgerald and Jane Carlyle; and the destinies of fictional heroines from Richardson's Clarissa to Ibsen's Nora. With fierce empathy and biting wit, Hardwick mines their childhoods, families, and personalities to probe the costs of sex, love, and marriage. Shattering the barrier between writing and life, she asks who is the seducer and who the seduced; who the victim and who the victor.

First published in 1974, yet both urgently timely and timeless, Seduction and Betrayal explodes the conventions of the essay: and the result is nothing less than a reckoning.

Sandi Toksvig - broadcaster, writer, actor, and seeker of all things whimsical, has turned her probing mind to many of the most intriguing questions of our times in the pages of the Sunday Telegraph for many years. Now, for the very first time, these musings have been collected in one hilarious collection. In The Chain of Curiosity, Sandi takes the reader on a side-splitting journey through life's peculiarities in a book packed with wit, wisdom and wonderment. From pondering the joys of World Pencil Day to examining the intricacies of applause etiquette, and from tip-toeing around the delicate art of school report vocabulary to researching the oddest way to meet a sticky end, the tickling tidbits and intriguing revelations contained within the book will delight Sandi's fans, both old and new.

The first comprehensive collection of the words and works of a movement-defining artist. Jean-Michel Basquiat (1960-1988) burst onto the art scene in the summer of 1980 as one of approximately one hundred artists exhibiting at the 1980 Times Square Show in New York City. By 1982, at the age of twenty-one, Basquiat had solo exhibitions in galleries in Italy, New York, and Los Angeles. Basquiat's artistic career followed the rapid trajectory of Wall Street, which boomed from 1983 to 1987. In the span of just a few years, this Black boy from Brooklyn had become one of the most famous American artists of the 1980s. The Jean-Michel Basquiat Reader is the first comprehensive sourcebook on the artist, closing gaps that have until now limited the sustained study and definitive archiving of his work and its impact. Eight years after his first exhibition, Basquiat was dead, but his popularity has only grown. Through a combination of interviews with the artist, criticism from the artist's lifetime and immediately after, previously unpublished research by the author, and a selection of the most important critical essays on the artist's work, this collection provides a full picture of the artist's views on art and culture, his working process, and the critical significance of his work both then and now.

As journalist Sam Quinones convincingly demonstrates, much of Mexico was already changing before the July 2000 presidential elections which ousted the PRI and presented the world with President-elect Vincente Fox. Fox's victory marked the triumph of another Mexico, a vital, energetic, and creative Mexico tracked by Quinones for over six years.

"This side of Mexico gets very little press. . . . yet it is the best of the country. . . . people who have the spunk to imagine something else and instinctively flee the enfeebling embrace of PRI paternalism. . . . newly realistic telenovellas show the gray government censor that the country is too lively to abide his boss's dictates. . . . Some twelve million Mexicans reside year-round in the United States. . . . [so] the United States is now part of the Mexican reality and is where this other side of Mexico is often found, reinventing itself."--from the introduction.

Quinones merges keen observation with astute interviews and storytelling in his search for an authentic modern Mexico. He finds it in part in emigrants, people who use wits and imagination to strike out on their own. In poignant stories from north of the border--about Oaxacan basketball leagues in southern California and the late singing legend Chalino SAAA1/2nchez whose songs of drug smugglers spurred the popularity of the narcocorrido--Quinones shows how another Mexico is reinventing itself in America today. But most of his stories are from deep inside Mexico itself. There a dynamic sector exists. It is made up of those who instinctively shunned the enfeebling embrace of the PRI's paternalism, including scrappy entrepreneurs such as the Popsicle Kings of Tocumbo and Indianmigrant farmworkers who found a future in the desert of Baja California. Here, too, are true tales from ignored margins of society, including accounts of drag queens and lynchings. From the fringes of the country, Quinones suggests, emerge some of the most telling and central truths about modern Mexico and how it is changing.

"This book expands our knowledge of modern Mexico many times over. Quinones unearths a wealth of material that has in fact gone unnoticed or been hidden."--Professor Francisco Lomeli, University of California, Santa Barbara

From a certain perspective, the biggest political story of 2016 was how the candidate who bought three-quarters of the political ads lost to the one whose every provocative Tweet set the agenda for the day's news coverage. With the arrival of bot farms, microtargeted Facebook ads, and Cambridge Analytica, isn't the age of political ads on local TV coming to a close? You might think. But you'd be wrong to the tune of $4.4 billion just in 2016. In U.S. elections, there's a lot more at stake than the presidency. TV spending has gone up dramatically since 2006, for both presidential and down-ballot races for congressional seats, governorships, and state legislatures-and the 2020 campaign shows no signs of bucking this trend. When candidates don't enjoy the name recognition and celebrity of the presidential contenders, it's very much business as usual. They rely on the local TV newscasts, watched by 30 million people every day-not Tweets-to convey their messages to an audience more fragmented than ever. At the same time, the nationalization of news and consolidation of local stations under juggernauts like Nexstar Media and Sinclair Broadcasting mean a decreasing share of time devoted to down-ballot politics-almost 90 percent of 2016's local political stories focused on the presidential race. Without coverage of local issues and races, ad buys are the only chance most candidates have to get their messages in front of a broadcast audience. On local TV news, political ads create the reality of local races-a reality that is not meant to inform voters but to persuade them. Voters are left to their own devices to fill in the space between what the ads say-the bought reality-and what political stories used to cover.

An award-winning writer and a candidate for the Nobel Prize for Literature, Ryszard Kapuscinski (1932-2007) was a celebrated Polish journalist and author. Praised for the lengths to which he would go to get a story, Kapuscinski gained an extraordinary knowledge of the major global events of the second half of the twentieth century and shared it with his diverse audience. The first posthumous monograph on the writer's life and work, Ryszard Kapuscinski confronts the mixed reception of Kapuscinski's tendency to merge the conventions of reportage with the artistry of literature. Beata Nowacka and Zygmunt Ziatek discuss the writer's accounts of the decolonization of Africa and his work in Asia and South America between 1956 and 1981, a period during which Kapuscinski reported on twenty-seven revolutions and coups. They argue that the journalistic tradition is not in conflict with Kapuscinski's meditations on the deep meanings of these events, and that his first-person involvement in his text was not an indulgence detracting from his journalistic adventures but a well-thought-out conception of eyewitness testimony, developing the moral and philosophical message of the stories. Exploring the whole of Kapuscinski's achievements, Nowacka and Ziatek identify a constant tension between a strictly journalistic position and what in Poland is called literary reportage, located on the border between journalism and artistic prose. Kapuscinski's desire and dedication to make more of journalistic writing is the driving force behind the excellence and readability that have made his legendary books so controversial - and so widely celebrated.