Although his name may not be familiar to some readers—the erudite manager of my local, independent bookstore didn’t know it—the Polish journalist and author Ryszard (pronounced Ree-SHAR) Kapuściński is venerated among leading writers, filmmakers, and other artists in the U.S. and Europe as a master of reportage and a literary giant, and as a man of great sweetness, vision, and generosity. For his job as a foreign correspondent for the Polish Press Agency, which he joined in 1962, he threw himself into dire situations all over Africa, the Middle East and elsewhere, filing one-page reports when he could. Hungry to chronicle the novelistic details of what he witnessed, as well as to portray the individuals he met along the way, he began to...