"I have come to thank dark places for the light they bring to life." What an opening line to this unusual travel book, subtitled A Memoir of Travel to the Darkest Places on Earth, a memoir of visits to "dark" places at some of which terrible deeds were done. Some are well-known; others less so, such as Machecoul in Brittany where "Bluebeard" sodomised and slaughtered hundreds of boys for 14 years; or New Echota, capital of the peaceful and industrious Georgian Cherokees, so wrongly deprived of their ancestral lands and forced to take the "Trail of Tears" to the wastes of Oklahoma.
One of the darkest places visited is Auschwitz; its grim lesson is that “we can have no confidence in the moral steadfastness of ourselves” if faced with stark choices. Cook writes movingly, perceptively, fulfilling his assertion that “there is much to be gained where much has been lost”.
