Tragic shores : a memoir of dark travel / Thomas H. Cook.

Includes bibliographical references.

'I have come to thank dark places for the light they bring to life.' Thomas Cook has always been drawn to dark places, for the powerful emotions they evoke and for what we can learn from them. These lessons are often unexpected and sometimes profoundly intimate, but never straightforward. Along with his wife and daughter, Cook travels across the globe in search of darkness - from Hawaii to Ghana, from San Francisco to Verdun, from the monumental, mechanised horror of Auschwitz to the intimate personal grief of a shrine to dead infants in Kamukura, Japan. Along the way he reflects on what these sites tell us about the history and the present of the countries they belong to, but also what they tell us about what it means to be human - and even at the sites of some of humanity's worst deeds, there are still reasons for optimism. Written in vivid prose, this is at once a personal memoir of exploration (both external and internal), and a strangely heartening look at the comforts that can be won when we confront mankind's heart of darkness.