David Lamb’s travels as a foreign correspondent for the Los Angeles Times have taken him to 140 countries and all seven continents. He is the author of three articles for National Geographic magazine, as well as the author of highly acclaimed books on the Middle East, sub-Sahara Africa and Vietnam. He has been nominated eight times for the Pulitzer Prize and been a Nieman Fellow at Harvard. “What I’ve tried to do in my writing and my travels,” he says, ”is to capture a sense of place—to go beyond the politics and economics and convey why a region becomes what it is and how ordinary people are impacted by the shifting currents of history.”