Kapuscinski would know. While reporting on about 30 revolutions around the world, he’s had one near-fatal experience after another. He was sentenced to death in Congo, survived a shoot-out in the Honduran jungle, went eyeball to eyeball with an Egyptian cobra and was surrounded by lions after getting a flat tire in the Serengeti. Each time, he was saved by chance or the anonymous hand of humanity. So the most remarkable thing about the 69-year-old Kapuscinski is that he’s even alive at all. His hair is white, but he looks fit and healthy. He’s just revisited Latin America for what will be the second part of a trilogy of observations, followed by a volume on Asia. “The Shadow of the Sun” is the first part and takes him back to the place he’s most closely associated with: Africa. It’s his sixth book translated into English, along with titles like “The Emperor,” about Haile Selassie, and “Imperium,” on the fall of the Soviet Union. He’s been translated into 30 languages and speaks six himself: French, Portuguese, Spanish, Russian, English and his native Polish (the language he always writes in).

Kapuscinski says he has always been drawn to the developing world because of his upbringing in Pinsk (now in Belarus) during World War II. “This was the poorest part of Europe, still is. I know what it means to have no shoes, I know what it means not to eat for several days, I know what it means when there’s shooting. So in places like Africa I feel very much at home. I understand them, and I communicate with those situations.”

But it’s more than empathy that makes Kapuscinski so readable. For one thing, it’s his personality: he admits fear, gets sick, gets lost (and asks for directions), gets beaten up, robbed, made the fool of, depressed. Then there’s his approach: he’s insightful but never patronizing. He has an affinity for the culture, but it’s without sickening white guilt. He’s an acute observer who finds the extraordinary in the quotidian. In a piece on Ghana, he writes: “I arrived in Kumasi with no particular goal. Having one is generally deemed a good thing, the benefit of something to strive toward. This can also blind you, however: you see only your goal, and nothing else, while this something else–wider, deeper–may be considerably more interesting and important.”

Kapuscinski finds that “something else” wherever he travels, takes it, makes it a fable or a collage or brings a character to life. Later in the book, describing the bureau chief of Agence France-Presse in Nairobi, he writes: “He knew everything.” Kapuscinski doesn’t know everything, and doesn’t think he does and is open to discovery. He poses questions, even if they are unanswerable.

And there is much that is unanswerable in Africa. He arrived there in the hopeful late 1950s, the end of colonial rule, Africa’s Great Leap Forward, but over the decades saw parts of the continent disintegrate into warfare–often fought by children–and famine and disease. The short pieces in the book reflect this. Some are dramatic, some cautionary. Others are searing primers (on Rwanda, Liberia, Sudan and Uganda under Amin). And then there are the odd, beautiful vignettes, like the time he was stranded in the Sahara with a Mauritanian driver he couldn’t communicate with, and barely any water.

The book is not without repetition. He makes the point more than once that he could have moved to the more livable parts of town but always turned down those opportunities. “How else can I get to know this city? This continent?” And the book seems to reflect a European (or is it universal?) fascination with the physique of the black male: “a powerful, well-built young man…”; “he was a brutal, greedy large man”; “with their strength, grace, and endurance, the indigenous move about naturally…” Still, it’s as good as Kapuscinski has given us.

All along, even amid despair, Kapuscinski finds grace. What’s missing, intentionally (and thankfully), are specific political details. “I’m not a political writer,” he says. “Politics is a waste of time.” He’s hoping to persuade Sonny Mehta to publish his aptly titled Lapidarium series of shorter observations from his travels. Then he’ll be off again, writing and traveling, using his usual methods. “I feel very bad in five-star hotels,” he says. “I feel awkward. I like to make things for myself, not to be served.” And that is the reader’s good fortune.