The Journey is the Destination

Book excerpt: By the time he was twenty-two, Dan Eldon had led a relief mission across Africa; worked as a graphic designer in New York; studied (intermittently) at four colleges; travelled through Europe, Africa, Japan, and the United States; founded a charity for Mozambiquan refugees; directed a film; written a book; started up his own photography business; and become a photojournalist for Reuters news agency, covering the famine and civil war in Somalia. There, in 1993, he was killed in an eruption of mob violence while on assignment. In a world of rules and regularity, Eldon was a renegade, a risk-taker, and an adventurer. His is no ordinary journal; it is an astonishing collage of photos, drawings, words, maps, and clippings that reveals his strange and vivid life. The Journey is the Destination is at once the vision of an artist in his prime and the unrestrained outpourings of a young man just beginning to live.