Clean Young Englishman

The honesty, if that is what it is, of John Gale's account of his upbringing, travels as a reporter, and episodes of madness permits little of the self serving that pollutes too many memoirs. "'Damn me if I haven't wound up in the nuthouse,' I thought," he writes near the end about his confinement at age 34, in 1959. A manic depressive, he was released after undergoing electroshock treatment. The horrors he witnessed reporting the Algerian war could not have left him unscathed, a result all the more poignant given the apparent clear sailing of his life up till then.