Imagine you're a journalist at the top of your game — you were sidesaddle on a camel alongside nomadic Turaeg as they rose up against Algeria's Sahara Initiative, starting a war the world would never have known about save for your stellar reporting. You broke the story of a 1,100-kilometer wall of sand built by hand to keep out roving Moroccans in the desert. Le Monde, Zeitung, the Washington Post: your investigative reporting knows no bounds. So, what do you do? Make love to a beautiful French photographer, of course. Then you get a little cocky. And then, you blow it.

That's what happens to British journalism's rising star Charles Mortimer, who writes a front-page article that was picked up by the wire services about the Soviet Union's diehard impregnability. Weeks later, the Berlin Wall came down, and with it all Mortimer's credibility as a reporter. The stories of Mortimer of the Maghreb begin in North Africa and Tajikistan, as Mortimer's career peaks at the world's most desperate sites — wars, earthquakes, and famines — and then crumbles into a stodgy food critic's complacency. Despite his rather self-promoting credo that a war doesn't exist without a journalist, Mortimer's enthusiasm for the mud huts, sandstorms, topless 4x4s, and muskets of his day job is contagious. During one of his many heady pontifications on the craft, he writes, "One had been given a number of decades in this sunny, tragic world — what else to do but explore and report back on what you saw?"

In this collection of (long) short stories, Shukman does just that. His lucid descriptions of exotic settings and Indiana Jones-wannabe narrators betray his own love for travel. A bon vivant whose map at home in Santa Fe is chock full of pins, Shukman is also a travel writer, trawlman, and trombonist. Like Peter Matthiessen and Allen Ginsberg, Shukman's been known to dabble in one of the world's strongest hallucinogens, ayahuasca, to cross other kinds of borders, as well. While each of these stories could stand alone, by weaving them together, the author has formed a piecemeal globe — the kind that hides a full bar within it. Sounds like a good travel companion, no?

-McKay McFadden