Mueller wanders the world’s failed states, ravaged war zones, and desolate no-man’s-lands to comprehend why we snatch war from the jaws of peace, why so much that can go wrong does go wrong, over and over again (Iraq, Afghanistan, Lebanon, and others), and how some conflicts suddenly, quietly, inexplicably seem to find themselves solved (Northern Ireland, Albania, Abkhazia).

Rather than offer a plaintive cry of “why can't we all get along,” Mueller observes that for the most part, people get along just fine; extremist minority groups are the major culprits. Yet it’s a surprisingly sunny book given the mire in which he finds himself. Mueller’s journey is an entertaining and eye-opening tour of the world’s moral basements, in which he meets influential panjandrums (Al Gore, Gerry Adams, Bono, Paddy Ashdown), any number of assorted warlords and revolutionaries, and a sprinkling of peacemakers and do-gooders. He also manages to get shot at a couple of times, locked up once, and taken on a guided tour by one of the world’s most infamous terrorist organizations.

Among various misadventures in more than 70 countries, ANDREW MUELLER has reported on the Taliban’s takeover of Afghanistan, the lifting of the siege of Bihac, the handover of Hong Kong, the invasion of Iraq, the wartime rock’n’roll scene of Sarajevo, an Elvis Presley festival in Tupelo and Ukraine’s efforts to launch Chernobyl as a tourist destination. He has ridden the Cresta Run, driven the proverbial Road to Damascus, been given a guided tour of Lebanon by Hizbollah, patrolled Basra with the Welsh Guards, Kabul with the Royal Anglian Regiment, and played the country songwriters’ open-mic night at the Bluebird Cafe in Nashville. Born in Australia, he has been based in London for the last twenty years.

As midnight GMT neared, I scanned my CD shelves for appropriate end credits music for the twentieth century, and an opening theme for the twenty-first. I decided to farewell the century I was born in with ‘The Final Countdown'. Not the original, recorded in a best-forgotten year of the 1980s by mullet-cropped Swedish lite-metal prancers Europe, but the uproariously pompous rock-operatic cover version from the 1994 album NATO, by Slovenian situationists Laibach, who'd souped up Europe's fatuous hit into Haydn-goes-disco sturm und drang sung by what sounded like Fozzie Bear from The Muppet Show with a headache.

It seemed right. In the outgoing epoch's closing decade, the country in which Laibach had formed, Yugoslavia, had suffered terminal doses of every foolishness that humanity had visited upon itself in the twentieth century — racism, nationalism, greed, bigotry, vanity, self-pity, ignorance, ideological headbanging, religious fanaticism, arcane historical grudge-bearing, international indifference — and in the 1990s I'd seen a small sample of the results in the countries which were now Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina. I suspected that Europe 's feather-follicled singer, Joey Tempest, had considered precisely none of these all-too-common human failings when he composed his lyric, but Laibach's grandiloquent interpretation detected, and reflected, a certain idiot savant sagacity in the song. Sung by Tempest, ‘The Final Countdown'was a silly tune about flying to Venus. Growled by Laibach's gruff, stentorian Milan Fras, it sounded like a wounded, weirdly dignified plea for an age of reason.

I welcomed the century I would die in — unless online canasta proves to possess as-yet-unheralded life-prolonging properties — with ‘Wheels', by the Flying Burrito Brothers. It's on the Burritos'1969 album Gilded Palace Of Sin, and it's my only superstition — playing it is always the last thing I do before leaving the building on any outing that necessitates luggage. ‘Wheels'is a standard-issue country trundle, elevated above the ordinary by a discordant guitar riff that buzzes beneath the chorus like a wasp trapped in a lunchbox, an impish flight of pedal steel, and a lyric espousing the cheerfully fatalistic attitude which one should always pack — along with sleeping bag and stomach medicines — as one prepares to sally to parts unknown, resigned to and yet excited by where the road may lead: ‘We're not afraid to ride,' croons Grain Parsons. ‘We're not afraid to die.'