Why, why?’ … You’re driving me nuts with your whys! When you get right down to it, there’s just one fundamental, immediate, irrevocable choice: it’s us or them. Forget the banality of evil, it’s the normalcy of evil. The child was eleven years old, and didn’t really understand the game the adults were playing, Pat-a-cake, pat-a-cake, baker’s man, Kill me a man as fast as you can. And, in Algiers in the winter of 1962, he didn’t understand why his huge, gentle father was lying there, absolutely still, on the marble slab at the morgue, either.

The child grew up and became a foreign correspondent. He traveled the world in a quest for answers, trying to understand the reasons behind violence, pain and death, like a frantic navigator sailing from port to port: Beirut to Sarajevo, Jerusalem to Baghdad, the heart of the Amazon to the mass graves of Rwanda. Like Ulysses, he embarks on a life-long journey, is battered by storms and high waves, battles sea monsters and witches, and winds up descending into Hell before coming back to the light of the world above. A long journey from the darkness toward the light of life.