- “Mademoiselle Fifi”, by Guy de Maupassant, from Mademoiselle Fifi and other stories. A story about a bad guy getting what's coming to him from an unlikely source. Too melodramatic for my taste.
- “Problem at Pollensa Bay”, by Agatha Christie, from Problem at Pollensa Bay and other stories. An entertaining little story about young love, starring Mr. Parker Pyne. Okay, but not outstanding.
- “The Nutcracker”, by Ben Travers. From A Century of Humour. A story about young love and naughty boys. Not particularly funny, but well told and would make a nice humorous short film.
- “The Jigsaw”, by Leonard R. Gribble. From A Century of Detective Stories. A nice little detective story, a twist on the jigsaw puzzle urban legend.
- "The Ring of Thoth", by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. From Tales of Unease. A short creepy story from the author of the Sherlock Holmes stories. Recommended.
-This reads like fiction - prose more beautiful than one has come to expect from non-fiction and many of the chapters are structured like fiction stories. There is little continuity between most of the chapters, although some of the narratives or stories spread over more than one chapter. This is therefore more a collection of short narratives than a cohesive entirety. You could pick it up and read the chapters at random and still get a good sense of what is going on. -Here is an author who is not trying to find himself, recover from a broken heart, set a record, visit 30 countries in 3 weeks or build a perfectly enviable home in a perfectly enviable location, which is a rarity within travel literature, but of course Kapuściński was in Africa to work, and not to travel for spiritual, mental or entertainment purposes (he was the Polish Press Agency's Africa correspondent for nearly 30 years). -I have no way of knowing how well Kapuściński knew Africa - I have never been there...
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