The premise of John Falk's memoir, Hello to All That, is at once engaging and absurd: After struggling with severe depression for years, the author finally finds a successful treatment. In order to prove to himself that he is recovered, and to reengage the world at its most extreme, he becomes a freelance war correspondent.

Even the most skeletal description of those circumstances invites expectations of, for instance, belabored comparisons of the author's internal battles to the more tangible war he reports on. It comes as a welcome surprise, then, that Falk not only manages to avoid the obvious, but dismantles it, in a memoir that is self-aware without being self-conscious, and deeply honest without narcissism.

Hello to All That begins with Falk's August 1993 arrival in Sarajevo, and his attempts to find work as a radio and print correspondent. In alternating chapters, the book also follows the history of his depression, which begins suddenly when he is twelve. For years he plays the part of himself, pretending to be the happy, popular person he once was, a facade maintained by "nothing less than the Twelve Labors of Hercules." Eventually, however, after multiple collapses, suicidal thoughts, and a string of failed medications, he finds one that works and, in the book's finest passage, reenters the world he has been an outsider to for so long. Becoming a war correspondent is both the ultimate test of that recovery, and the fulfillment of a dream deferred by depression.

While the lack of political, historical, or even military context at first suggests that war is a tool with which the author can heal himself, early frustration gives way as the book becomes more complex. Expectations are upended by the juxtaposition of slapstick humor and horrific suffering, as when Falk is interviewed under suspicion of being a spy, and manages to set his own pants on fire. Though at times this bumbling is overplayed, most often it underscores an insistence that this memoir not be read as a heroic account, or a simple story about redemption and healing, or as any other single thing.

Rather than attempt to explain the whole scope of the conflict, Hello to All That focuses on microscopic elements without assigning them easy meanings. For months, Falk pursues a story about the city's snipers, intrigued by their anonymous, arbitrary killing. "Knowing a sniper is loose," he writes,

is like knowing a cobra is at large somewhere in your house. It makes you paranoid. It freezes you. You stop walking by beds, couches; you open drawers. One is left with the eerie sensation that instant death is always just a moment away. People who live under the fear of snipers lose track of everything in the world but their fear; it's a very dark hold that these gunmen have on the regions they terrorize. In this passage, and in the diverse techniques by which Sarajevans navigate "sniper alley," similarities between living with snipers and living with depression become engaging, and suggestive, but never forced -- there is none of the literal insistence that would have made the connection selfish or specious.

As with politics, Falk scarcely addresses humanitarian or moral questions head on; he does, however, offer such careful, affectionate attention to the family he boards with and the other Sarajevans he becomes close to that issues become individuals. As he tries to help the children of his host family escape the war, he makes significant choices without asking his particular circumstances to stand for global solutions or explanations. Rather than the apolitical, arrogant, and narcissistic account the book's early chapters lead the reader to expect (which, by the end, seems to have been an intentional and successful strategy), Hello to All That becomes both generous and compassionate.

In War is a Force that Gives Us Meaning, the culmination of his years as a war correspondent, Chris Hedges explored the personal and political myths that lead soldiers and reporters alike to prove themselves on the battlefield. John Falk's memoir builds on Hedges' investigations as it goes a step further, peeling away easy assumptions to reveal his own complex attraction to war. Like the Robert Graves' classic from which its title is drawn, Hello to All That reminds us that every account of war from any reporter is, necessarily, delivered within the context of an individual and idiosyncratic life, and that the way to make sense of violence (if there is one) might be to make sense of the lives drawn toward it.