River of Time

The English have always seemed peculiarly prone to living adventurous lives, and here's Jon Swain to prove it. Raised in India, Swain joined the French Foreign Legion at 17 and was a foreign correspondent for Agence France-Presse by his early twenties. His first assignment in 1970: Indochina. Swain spent five years there, had a long love affair with the woman commonly thought to be the most beautiful in Saigon, was fired upon numerous times, was working in Phnom Penh when it fell to the Khmer Rouge, had a pistol held to his head by a teenage guerrilla, and lived to write River of Time, a thrilling and disturbing memoir. 281 pages.