KEY POINTS:
To Lamb, who has been a foreign correspondent for several English newspapers, the real story is not the politics but the people. Instead of focusing on the "situation" in Iraq or Afghanistan or Zimbabwe, she tells the human stories.
Here are a few of the people she encounters in this fascinating, frightening collection: Mr Hassani, a former Taleban torturer. His victims' crimes were playing cards, watching a video, owning a kite. One was beaten to such a pulp it was impossible to tell whether he was dressed or not. "Every time he fell unconscious we rubbed salt into his wounds."
Alex, one of the millions of street kids in Brazil. The police routinely murder them by night because the hungry children damage the tourist trade with their begging and threats. There is widespread public support for the practice.
Dora, a 12-year-old gang-raped by Robert Mugabe's thugs for four hours until she was unable to walk, because her father did not support the president's party. Her mother and sisters were forced not only to watch but to sing songs in praise of Zimbabwe's leader. It has happened to hundreds, maybe thousands of girls, and Dora's story is not the worst.
Lamb says that of all the hellhole stories she has covered, Zimbabwe is the most heartbreaking. She visited in 1994 and marvelled at an African nation with traffic lights that worked, pothole-free roads, neat brick schools and book cafes.
Now the country is a wasteland, its starving people living in terror. Some of what were the most advanced farms in the world are charred or overgrown. At one stage last year Zimbabwe's inflation rate was about 10,000 per cent. No other country has experienced such a decline in peacetime.
The book is not all grim. Lamb's writing can move a reader to tears but somehow, perhaps essentially, she retains a sense of humour, as in her piece on the Bolivian Navy.
Bolivia has been a landlocked country since it lost a war with Chile in 1879. But it wants a piece of Pacific coastline back and says so at every opportunity. Each year there is a Day of the Sea. School textbooks are full of pictures of crashing waves, and statues in otherwise sleepy town centres depict demonic Bolivians bayoneting hapless Chileans under the inscription: "What once was ours will again be." Meanwhile, the navy grows vegetables.
Lamb ventures up the Amazon (she'll venture anywhere) to report on the plight of the Yanomami Indians, threatened by extermination because their land is rich in minerals. She finds a Japanese karaoke club (and is forced to sing the entire Elvis catalogue); observes the Amazon's first Avon ladies, selling lipsticks from canoes; and visits an opera house in the jungle (the orchestra is Bulgarian).
In Portugal she meets a professional wailer and is told: "You never know when you might need a wailer. I do weddings, funerals, graduations. Anything where a wail or two might add some authenticity. Think of the shame of an occasion with no wailing."
And in a piece titled "Yes, I was a Cynic Until I Met Her", she covers Princess Diana's visit to landmine victims in Angola. "Many of the injuries were so gruesome that I could not look, despite years of Third World reporting. But Diana never turned her head away."
There is much more: an interview with Taleban leaders, tea with General Pinochet, a session at a Nigerian fattening room where women go to expand their bellies and buttocks so they can attract a husband.
The book is more than a collection of reports. Lamb writes introductory and linking pieces to put her human (and humane) stories in contexts - political, professional and personal - and there are footnotes updating the older articles.
She calls herself a hack but this is the work of a journalist of immense courage, integrity and insight.
SMALL WARS PERMITTING: Dispatches From Foreign Lands
Christina Lamb (HarperCollins $25.99)
