"More than diamonds, I want peace."
Kenji Goto knew hell as well as anyone who doesn't have to live there. He was a journalist. His place, he felt, was where suffering was greatest, misery deepest, evil ugliest, cruelty most feral. He covered genocide in Rwanda, anarchy in Sierra Leone, AIDS in Estonia, religious-tribal hatred on the Pakistan-Afghanistan border. His mission, as he saw it, was to show his compatriots how low human beings can sink — also, sometimes, how high they can rise.
He wrote four books. Shukan Gendai magazine, which profiles them, says they were written primarily for children, in simple language, the idea being to introduce Japanese children to children in other places living lives that a typical Japanese upbringing scarcely gives one the means to imagine.
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