Here is a fascinating survey of those knight errants of journalism, the foreign correspondents, and their generally fickle and uniformed publics back home. Mr. Hohenberg traces the rise of foreign correspondence from its infancy with the London Times back around the French Revolution to today's beleaguered newsgatherers in Indonesia. Whether the reader is trudging through darkest Africa with Stanley in search of Livingstone or is lying on a bed in Madrid with calmest Hemingway while the shells roar and the carbines bark outside, one is in irresistible company. Knight errant is not as far-fetched an epithet as it might seem, for it is the first duty of a foreign correspondent to make himself heard and understood in an increasingly wicked world where ignorance is tantamount to oppression. Few correspondents are out there in the rice paddies after a paycheck; these are men with a consuming desire to study the smashed windows and gutted house of the present, and to report first-hand why ""the best lack all conviction and the worst are full of passionate intensity."" The book also covers censorship, the rise of news services, and it renews one's faith in reporters if not in newspapers.