Falk writes with humor:

The highlight of the trip was getting stopped by four Serb soldiers... A little on the pudgy side, they were dressed in purple-and-blue tiger-pattern fatigues that could only have been useful if they were fighting their way across Liberace's living room.

and with evocative color:

The two [Bosnians] ... were scheming together to sneak through the siege lines and make it to London.

"God," the short one said to me. "Will you look at that. It's almost pretty in a way, isn't it?" He was pointing out the window with his Gauloises at the tracer fire I had noticed earlier, only now there were green tracers as well as red arcing across the sky.

"I believe the green are ours," the tall one said.

But occasionally the language jars, as when Falk refers to a group of young women as "chicks," or sacrifices grammar for colloquial familiarity: "my inner thighs burned so bad it felt as if I'd just dismounted a Brillo pad." This inconsistency of tone is a small flaw, however, and doesn't persist after the first few chapters. A bigger problem is that both stories - Falk's battle with clinical depression, and his wartime adventures - seem a little sketchy. The Bosnian tales are so interesting (the most dramatic of them became the HBO film "Shot Through the Heart") that one wishes they'd been told at greater length. And the memoir of illness and recovery, while intense and dramatic, leaves one wishing the author had gone deeper.

Of course, depression is an illness that can leave long stretches of one's life essentially blank. It may be that we should be grateful for people like Falk who have good enough memories, and write well enough, to even partially convey what the depths of the illness are like. There are so many sufferers who can't speak for themselves, locked in their own thoughts as they are - or dead of it.