Author and former Toronto Star photo journalist Paul Watson inadvertently caught the world’s attention in October 1993, with his infamous photograph of the corpse of an American helicopter crew member being dragged through a dusty back street in Mogadishu by a mob of angry Somalians. He won a Pulitzer prize for the shot, but has also been haunted by it for more than a decade, for deciding to “steal a dead man’s last shred of dignity.”

The image of Staff Sgt. William David Cleveland lurks in the background of much of this book, which reads like a bullet-pocked tour of some of the globe’s most wretched hellholes of the last 15 years, including Somalia, Rwanda, Kosovo, and Afghanistan. Watson, now South Asia Bureau Chief for The Los Angeles Times, is a manic combination of grizzled, devil-may-care risk-taker, living and drinking hard, and big-eyed idealist, earnestly outraged and genuinely surprised that governments and armies often lie about their actions.

There are plenty of narrow escapes and grisly accounts of the killing fields here, as well as some criticism of U.S. and United Nations policy – Watson knows of what he speaks. His point of view is from the front lines, not the editorial pages, and there is honour in that, even if being so close to the action crowds out other parts of the story.

For this adrenaline junkie, war and the brutality of humans – “the reign of the beasts,” as Watson calls it, quoting Camus – seem to be both the cause of, and cure for, the author’s occasionally tenuous grip on his senses.