If any book deserves to be called the Dante's Inferno of our age, this is it. Unfortunately, it's not fiction. It's all true and for that matter sickening and overbearing, but a bit like passing a car wreck on the highway you can't help but turn and look.

The writing is good, borderline excellent. The main problem though is that it's not fiction. It reads like fiction. The setting is laid down, characters are introduced, but the heroes never burst onto the scene with tommy guns blazing. And you want them to. The stories just twist you up inside, truly gut wrenching - and that's not the part that deals with modern cannibals. If anything, cannibalism is just the golden (bloody?) fleece of the tale, the bulk of the book is about the hellhole fourth world societies which have grown up around it, fostered it, caused it, and woefully neglects the matter of fixing it. Everything in this world is as twisted and tangled and squirming as the boa constrictor pictured strangling the author on the book jacket. When it is finally addressed the cannibalism almost seem to make sense. Almost.

Through this fetid trip around the world you get stone age cannibals holding back the onslaught of modernism in the south pacific. Hindu Aghors, holy men whose religion would make even Beavis and Butthead cringe with its fecal obsessions and delusions. In Uganda you get an army of Christian whack-jobs who have replaced love thy neighbor with cut off his lips and ears. As well as an endless procession of psychotic dictators, oblivious bureacrats, ruthless gangsters, corrupt cops, thieves, mobs, sex slaves and paramilitary juntas. The section on Uganda was so abhorrent I simply had to stop. It's amazing the amount of rage and hate this kind of thing can generate in an otherwise nice and peaceful person. But I guess that's the point. The reactionaries and revolutionaries can all too easily grow just as demonic as the oppressive forces they fight against. The violence is circular. It just keeps going and growing and going and growing. In Uganda, reading about Idi Admin, I found myself thinking that what this country needs is few good nuclear warheads, a hit of the big cosmic reset button to knock them back to start once the radiation decays to a tolerable half-life.

And that's when I closed the book up and moved it from the stack taken out of the library and into the stack to go back to it.

So read it if you wish, but be warned that this is potent stuff. This is the feel bad book of the year. If anything it makes you feel as if “the first world” has simply left the Earth and all the countries on it have been knocked down a peg; hence “the fourth world.” The big question is not how did this happen, but how much lower can we go?