Bowden is one of many doomed characters who drift across the pages of “The Zanzibar Chest: A Story of Life, Love, and Death in Foreign Lands,” Hartley’s lyrical, searing memoir of his years as a roving Africa reporter. The Kenya-born son of a British soldier turned peripatetic development worker, Hartley fell into journalism in his early 20s, just as the end of the cold war, pressures for democratization and tribal rivalries were tearing apart fragile societies across the continent. He spent much of the next decade as part of a small band of nomads who risked their lives roving from conflict zone to conflict zone, documenting both the allure and horror of Africa. Hartley followed rebels into Ethiopia in their drive to oust dictator Haile Mengistu and combed the lush green hills of Rwanda during the genocide. It was a life, Hartley writes, of “all-nighters, hitching rides on tanks busting down palace gates, sipping dictators’ champagne, scoops and whores and house arrests.” It was also a life of near-constant peril and violence, which took a heavy toll on nearly everyone in Hartley’s orbit, including the author himself.

The most vivid part of Hartley’s memoir is the meltdown of Somalia in the early 1990s. One of the first foreign journalists to arrive there during the civil war that brought down dictator Mohammed Siad Barre, he was an eyewitness to the rise of the warlords, the terrible famine, the U.S. aid mission and its botched aftermath. Despite the suffering going on around him, Hartley found himself falling under Mogadishu’s apocalyptic spell. “The tableau was more sublime to me than the cityscapes of Florence, or Paris, or Manhattan,” he admits. “I’d hear the muezzin pipe up from a dozen mosques for… afternoon prayers, caressing the broken lines of the city with Kufic arabesques of sound. The amplified cries to God, impact explosions, sea breeze, soft light, and my heartbeat wove together.”

Hartley’s narrative is far more than a travelogue from hell, however. It is a cry of moral outrage against militia leaders such as Mohammed Farah Aidid, who blithely looted his country while hundreds of thousands died. He also blasts the international community, which stood by while Somalia descended into anarchy. By the time President George Bush sent U.S. troops splashing ashore in front of a gaggle of TV cameras, the famine had already run its course, Hartley reports. And the doomed “nation-building” effort that followed, led by clueless U.S. diplomats and generals, only compounded the misery of the people it was trying to help.

During his years covering Africa, Hartley partied as hard as he worked. There’s an undeniable fascination and poignancy in watching him and his colleagues escape from the horrors of war into a self-destructive mix of cocaine use and whoring at the height of the African AIDS epidemic. Hartley surrounded himself with a coterie of hyperintelligent young writers and adventurers–some of them, like the author, raised in Kenya–who shared his wanderlust and his passion for life on the edge. A sense of doom hangs over many members of this talented, eccentric crew. Indeed, Hartley lost four of his colleagues to a mob in Mogadishu, two more in the crash of a hijacked Ethiopian jet, and one to a heroin overdose in a squalid Pakistani hotel room.

One of the few shortcomings in Hartley’s book is the diversion he makes into the life of Peter Davey, a colleague of his father who was murdered in Yemen in the 1940s. Hartley clearly would like us to see parallels between his own life and that of the unfortunate Davey, another expatriate enthralled by the developing world. But Davey’s oft-cited diaries–which Hartley dug up in the eponymous Zanzibar chest belonging to his father after the elder Hartley’s death–aren’t as compelling as Hartley’s own prose, and Davey emerges as a figure neither especially heroic nor captivating. The author’s journeys to Yemen, while beautifully rendered, distract from his powerful core narrative, which seamlessly merges his story with his parents’ own African romance. “If only we could be certain of peace, I can see the most perfect and exciting life ahead,” Hartley’s mother exclaimed in 1951, shortly after the family arrived on the continent. Out of the ashes of those misbegotten hopes, Hartley has fashioned a mesmerizing story of pain and loss.