Excursions

A village in Sierra Leone. A refugee trail over the Pyrenees in French Catalonia. An historic copper mine in Sweden. The Shuf mountains in Lebanon. The Swiss Alps. The author makes his sojourns to each of these far-flung locations and to his native New Zealand occasions for exploring the contradictions and predicaments of social existence.

Urging a recognition of the limits to which human existence can be explained in terms of cause and effect, he suggests that knowing why things happen may ultimately be less important than trying to understand how people endure in the face of hardship.