Happily, Lapierre is better as a samaritan than as a writer
That's why it's difficult to review this book. Yes, it's full of fascinating tales about Lapierre's travels and exploits as top reporter for the French magazine Paris Match. One can't help but be moved by a re-telling of the exploits of Gaston Grandjean and James Stevens, the men whose exploits are lovingly detailed in the City of Joy. There are other positive points. But there is also much to scuttle enjoyment of this book.
Lapierre has an unfortunate affection for the empty cliche. He is regaled by the smell of 'incense, curry and urine on a third-class rail trip across north India. His travelling companions are 'three lovely creatures in 'brightly coloured saris. And there are many unfortunate references to skin colour that come from an earlier age when it was considered acceptable to be acutely aware of such things. Not that there's any suggestion that Lapierre has a racist bone in his body. That's clearly not so, but one wonders why he so often finds it necessary to tell us about the colour of his own or someone's skin.
Earlier works like Freedom at Midnight and City of Joy have done extremely well for Lapierre. Long before anyone had even heard of the Discovery Channel, he tapped into the reading public's need to both learn and be entertained. But serious historians, and I dare say, more hard-edged journalists have always had a problem with his populist, almost sentimental approach to his topics. His research is usually thorough; the problem lies in the writing, and the easy attribution of quotes and characters to people he's never met. In Freedom at Midnight, for example, Jinnah is portrayed as arrogant and inflexible to an almost unbelievable degree-an injustice to a deeply complex and highly intelligent individual who needs to be better understood, especially in India. A Thousand Suns adds nothing to our knowledge of Jinnah, Mountbatten or Sir Cyril Radcliffe, but it does delve rather more intriguingly into the personality of Caryl Chessman, an American executed for murder in California in the 1960s.
Many of the anecdotes in A Thousand Suns are from the '50s and '60s. They concern stories, like Chessman's ordeal on Death Row, that have come and gone, sunk without a trace in today's manic march of events. Lapierre did his serious journalism in a different era whose icons and defining moments have lost their lustre, and this book suffers from a subsequent lack of topicality. However noble his aims in writing it, A Thousand Suns is not destined to be in the front rank of journalistic memoirs, whatever one thinks of that form of writing. But he has certainly lived one of hell of a life, and helped countless others to live theirs more comfortably. So I take my hat off to him, even if I didn't like this book.