Slate:
Scratch a KapuÅ›ciÅ„ski enthusiast and he’ll insist that everybody who reads the master’s books understands from context that not everything in them is to be taken literally. This is a bold claim, as KapuÅ›ciÅ„ski’s work draws its power from the fantastic and presumably true stories he collects from places few of us will ever visit and few news organization have the resources to re-report and confirm. If KapuÅ›ciÅ„ski regularly mashes up the observed (journalism) with the imagined (fiction), how certain can we be of our abilities to separate the two while reading?
Should we regard KapuÅ›ciÅ„ski’s end product as journalism? Should we give KapuÅ›ciÅ„ski a bye but castigate Stephen Glass, who defrauded the New Republic and other publications by doing a similar thing on a grosser scale? Do we cut KapuÅ›ciÅ„ski slack because he was better at observing, imagining, and writing than Glass, and had the good sense to write from exotic places? Exactly how is KapuÅ›ciÅ„ski different from James Frey in practice if not in execution?
Honestly, I’d never heard such critiques of KapuÅ›ciÅ„ski before. He’s still a fantastic writer, but I think that Shafer makes a good point. Can we consider KapuÅ›ciÅ„ski to be a real journalist?
One thing though — Shafer links to John Ryle’s 2001 review of The Shadow of the Sun in the Times Literary Supplement, where Ryle points out a whole list of factual inaccuracies with KapuÅ›ciÅ„ski’s reportage.
However, in a later point, refuting KapuÅ›ciÅ„ski’s assertion of going to the bookstore in the University of Addis Ababa, “the country’s only bookstore,” Ryle goes on to say: “There may not be a branch of Borders, or Barnes and Noble, In Kampala, but there are numerous thriving bookshops there, and also in Nairobi, Dar-es-Salaam, Dakar, Abidjan, Durban, Johannesburg, Cape Town and dozens of cities across Africa, small and large.”
Here in Dakar, the only respectable bookstore that I’ve seen is the “Librarie aux Quatre Vents,” (55, Rue Felix Faure, +221 821 80 83) which is a large, air-conditioned two-story building. It takes credit cards, and is closed from 12h30 until 15h00 for lunch every day that it’s open (ie, not on Sunday). It’s in the heart of downtown Dakar, in the neighborhoods where it’s not uncommon to see a few foreign folks walking about. (Based on those hours alone, I’m guessing that it’s owned by a French family.)
A quick Internet search tells me that there’s also the Librarie Clairafrique, (Rue Docteur Thèze x Rue Sandiniéry, +221 822 21 69), but I’ve never been there.
I’ve spotted a handful of smaller bookstores around town that don’t really have much in the way of a selection beyond a tiny smattering of obscure textbooks, grade-school exercise books and Islam-themed books. In Saint-Louis, the only other city that has a university, has two very small bookstores, with a extremely small collection of books along those same topics. You’d never find novels, reference books, works of non-fiction or anything else along those lines in any of these other bookstores.
Still, I’d gladly bet that if the other cities in Senegal even have bookstores, none of them even come to be “numerous” or “thriving” in a country where 60 percent of the country is illiterate.
Mr. Ryle, if you know of other “thriving” bookstores in Senegal, please tell me where I can find them?
Katie Hafner (former New York Times writer and a mentor and friend of mine) will be giving a talk and reading at Moe’s Bookstore on Telegraph Ave. in Berkeley on May 20 at 7:30 pm about her book: A Romance on Three Legs: Glenn Gould’s Obsessive Quest for the Perfect Piano, which is just out in paperback. 
