Aldo Busi is a travel writer with a difference. The difference lies in his sexuality and his sense of living on the margin of society. From this derives his instinctive sympathy with those whom poverty, the accident of birth or social injustice also marginalize, whether they live in the slums of South America or the cities of North Africa. In writing of them and their fates he shows deep compassion. That compassion is offset by the sharp edge o fhis comments on the well-heeled men and women he meets in intellectual circles in London or Lisbon, Brussels or Paris, Rio or Reykjavik. Here he has an acute ear for cant and an eye for the bizarre and the pretentious. The world as Busi sees it is a sad, depressing place in which he sustains himself by his sense of the ridiculous and his defiant courage.