Vollman, William T. An Afghanistan Picture Show: Or, How I Saved the World. 1992.

A fragmented mixture of William T. Vollman's experiences travelling to Afghanistan in the early 1980's as a Young Man and his later reflections as, presumably, an Old Man upon the attitudes he held as a Young Man.

The "Picture Show" in the title refers to the fact that he dragged several cameras along with him, although none of the photos he took ended up in the book.

Parts of the writing are fierce and unimprovable ("Preface", "Alaska", "The Red Hill"), although the book is prone to drag in its middle third, through fragmented memoirs of being extremely ill in Pakistan, waiting for a chance to cross the border.

The Young Man was idealistic beyond his means, The Old Man is cynical and I don't know that his adventures or writings after this had the samespark of nobility, however misguided, of the 22-year-old who went to Afghanistan to fight the Russians. From what I know of William Vollman's career, prolific writer-adventurer and scholar of the underbelly, I am nostalgic for that Young Man. Saving the world takes work, and you can't do it by responding to the latest headlines.

"And if he had been a Soviet Young Man, he would have gone to Nicaragua."

This a good book. At l\east read "Alaska."