Proving once again that the journalistic impulse can be the strongest (and strangest) compulsion, these essays are about life at the extremes. Denis Johnson seeks out the limits of this world and reports on them. If it isn’t meeting Prince Johnson days after he videotaped the torture and execution of Samuel Doe of Liberia, it might be attending a bikers for Jesus revival meeting. There’s the anarchist’s guide to Somalia in which he attempts to be the last journalist in Somalia arriving just as the UN leaves. The Taliban show up as do the Montana militia and those that support the then-fugitive Eric Rudolph who used to blow up abortion clinics. All of these juxtapositions make sense as do the more personal pieces, reminiscences about hippie life or a misguided honeymoon prospecting for gold in Alaska. And then to bookend these pieces with macabre symmetry, the small boys unit, the return engagement to Liberia ostensibly to profile Charles Taylor. Beauty and horror intermingled with a frightening consistency, but such is life I suppose.