James Thieroux wrote a travel book on Iran before the revolution. While journalists were writing about the Shah’s powerful military, arms sales to his government, etc., Thieroux did his railway journey and wrote about all the fundamentalist Shias he saw in every city and village, and of their unbridled hatred of the secular government and concluded, “something has to give.” His was the first reporting that seemed to grasp what was happening for he was seeing it from the village streets, as a travel writer would. V.S. Naipaul likewise traveled through sub-Saharan Africa and was the first to note the mass migration of rural Africans into urban areas, foreshadowing the collapse of post-colonial Africa.

The real conversations occurred in the silences; in the things unspoken.

American press interest is less in foreign affairs than in the foreign extension of our domestic obsessions – the Middle East, South Africa, human rights, feminism.