Ryszard Kapuscinski disappeared in the dead of winter, January 2007, half as well known as his influence would lead one to expect. He went into the beyond Nobel-less, like Joyce and Proust and Nabokov, but to many who read him he was as exalted: “deity” was used, more than once, in his assorted funeral songs. While such desperate formulations as “world literature” conjure up bongos, beads and sitting Indian-style, the books Kapuscinski wrote may actually qualify, as evocative and singular in English as they are in their native (and what is said to be austerely fine) Polish. For many of us, the day of his death was a dark, cold day.

Until 1983, most Western readers would have mistaken the man for Polish espresso. Kapuscinski’s first book to appear in English, thanks to the translation of the husband-and-wife team of William R. Brand and Katarzyna Mroczkowska-Brand, was “The Emperor” (originally published in Polish in 1978), a spell-casting oral history of Haile Selassie’s rule over Ethiopia. “The Emperor” was followed in 1985 by what many believe to be Kapuscinski’s masterpiece, “Shah of Shahs” (originally published in 1982), a short, tense, fragmentary account of the 1979 Iranian revolution. In 1987 came “Another Day of Life” (originally published in Polish in 1976), his bizarre and shattering reportage from Angola as its former Portuguese overlords fled for their lives. These three books brought Kapuscinski acclaim in the West as perhaps the world’s leading literary journalist. The acclaim was rather tardy, seeing that for the past three decades Kapuscinski had been filing dispatches from the Indian subcontinent, Asia, Latin America and, most often, Africa, initially in the service of a Polish youth journal as its first and only foreign correspondent and later for the Polish Press Agency. As his now famous about-the-author note from “The Shadow of the Sun” (2001) informs us, Kapuscinski “witnessed 27 coups and revolutions” and “was sentenced to death four times,” a biographical précis many nonfiction writers would do anything, short of earning it, to have.

Kapuscinski’s African dispatches largely made his name. Like his countryman Joseph Conrad, to whom he is often compared and to whom he bears almost no resemblance, Kapuscinski has become embedded in the continent’s literary firmament. Upon Kapuscinski’s death, however, the young Kenyan writer Binyavanga Wainaina attacked “the racist writer Kapuscinski” as being the author of some of his “all-time classic lines about Africa,” such as “In Africa, the notion of abstract evil — evil in and of itself — does not exist.” It is hard to blame those angered by some of Kapuscinski’s more careless statements about Africa. His risky generalizations may suggest a seeming lack of recognition of Africa’s varied and heterodox cultures, but that seems a minor sin in light of how deeply he attempted to understand it and how much of his life he spent there. Kapuscinski knew, of course, how complicated his subjects were. “The European in Africa,” he wrote in “The Shadow of the Sun,” “sees only part of it” and can only fall short when attempting to describe “the immense realm” of African psychology. His subject matter was local but his tone was cosmic, dislocated and sometimes surreal. His miner’s light lingered deep in recesses of totalitarianism, mysticism and revolution — places where truth begins to lose access to the photosynthesis of fact. A coloration not often noted by those in opposition to Kapuscinski is that his is the Africa of a man from a subject country who discovered it just as its nations were snapping the leashes of their colonial masters. In the end, great nonfiction writing does not necessarily require any accuracy greater than that of an honest and vividly rendered confusion. The limits of human perception cruelly bind us all.

Kapuscinski’s final book, “Travels With Herodotus,” is about the Father of History, a man so bound by his fifth-century-B.C. perception and experience as to appear by modern standards almost intellectually comatose. “He had never heard of China,” Kapuscinski writes, “or Japan, he did not know of Australia or Oceania, had no inkling of the existence, much less the great flowering, of the Americas. If truth be told, he knew little of note about western and northern Europe.” He also believed that Ethiopian men ejaculated black semen. Yet, to Kapuscinski, Herodotus was “the first globalist” and “the first to argue that each culture requires acceptance and understanding.” How much Herodotus actually traveled we cannot know, and a good deal of “Travels With Herodotus” is occupied with Kapuscinski’s ceaseless wonderings about his early life (“Did he build sand castles at the edge of the sea?”), family history (“Might Herodotus’s father have been a merchant himself?”) and personality (“Perhaps he had a naturally inquiring mind?”). The book’s true nature, however, is that of an unabashed memoir, the author’s first, and it opens with Ryszard, age 19, studying Greek history at Warsaw University. Although a Polish translation of Herodotus was not available until 1955, shortly after Stalin’s death, Kapuscinski became a lifelong pupil of Herodotus’s time, “a world of sun and silver, warm and full of light, populated by slender heroes and dancing nymphs.” It was also a world that seemed determined to destroy itself through internecine warfare.