Jungle book: the foreign correspondent as thrill-seeker.

• Author: Hammer, Joshua
• Position: On Political Books

The Zanzibar Chest: A Story of Life, Love, and Death in Foreign Lands By Aidan Hartley Atlantic Monthly Press, $24.00

The battered Somali capital of Mogadishu was a playground for a certain type of foreign correspondent in the early 1990s. In the after-math of the civil war that drove out the dictator Mohammed Siad Barre, a corps of young adventurers arrived on the scene to document the country's anarchy while inhaling its post-apocalyptic ambience. Hurtling along the sunswept coast in a battered Toyota tilled with AK-47-toting bodyguards, with the turquoise Indian Ocean on one side and a sweep of bullet-scarred Arab villas on the other, one could feel like a star in one's own movie.

As Aidan Hartley relates in The Zanzibar Chest: A Story of Life, Love, and Death in Foreign Lands, his dazzling new account of those years, Somalia's horror was inextricable from its allure. When American soldiers first arrived on the shores of the Somali capital in December 1992 to feed the starving, Hartley writes, they quickly found their way to the beautiful white-sand beaches along the Indian Ocean. Nobody had told them that the warm waters off Mogadishu had long been a dumping ground for offal--and a breeding ground for sharks. The beach parties continued for several weeks--until the attacks began. A young Frenchwoman bathing just off shore was torn in half before horrified onlookers, and a Russian wading in the surf was dragged to his death. The Marines erected a skull and crossbones "No Swimming" sign; Club Med Mogadishu quickly fizzled out.

Hartley's book is a gonzo adventure story; a mesmerizing account of his decade as a war correspondent for Renters, chiefly in East and Central Africa. In his early twenties when he fell into journalism, the Kenya-born Hartley displayed a serendipitous sense of timing. The collapse of Cold War rivalry led to the withdrawal of U.S. and Soviet support for their proxy, states across the continent; dictators toppled, pressures for democratization grew, and political convulsions unleashed a wave of civil wars, tribal conflict, and in the case of Rwanda, one of the worst mass slaughters of the 20th century. Hartley was in the thick of it, part of a peripatetic pack who shuttled from combat zone to combat zone--Ethiopia, Somalia, Sudan, Rwanda--filing dispatches to deadline and partying hard in his down time. When not following Ethiopian rebels through the bush, or bearing witness to the Rwandan genocide, Hartley was...