I couldn't help but laugh out loud when I read that an old toilet from a house that belonged to author J.D. Salinger was up for auction on Ebay. I laughed even louder when I read that the asking price was 1 million US Dollars. The thought that anyone would actually buy something like this strikes me as very funny, but in today's celebrity culture it wouldn't surprise me if someone actually bought it. I also couldn't help thinking that "Salinger's Toilet" would make a fine title for a surrealistic short story or a novel.
-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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I wouldn´t even spend large sums of money on valuable first editions. I would always think about how many ordinary books I could get for the same sum.