The principal quality that immediately stands out in Alan Moorehead's travel books, historical investigations, biographies, and fiction is his enthusiastic but level-headed curiosity. The eye for the immediate and for the telling detail that made Moorehead a successful journalist also characterizes his books. This talent serves his larger, more stimulating, although less immediately apparent, gift: the capacity to realize that a place is on the brink of important transformations. As a travel writer Moorehead is not so much interested in a “dream of an encounter with a pristine world”—as Dennis Porter formulates one of the motivations of travel writers in Haunted Journeys: Desire and Transgression in European Travel Writing (1991)—as he is in how people adapt to change and extremity. Moreover, travel writing formed a part of everything Moorehead wrote, whether or not his books appear to belong to the genre in conventional terms.

Alan McCrae Moorehead...