Over There is the third volume of Stan Nguyen’s comic memoirs. For a man who, in the course of this book, celebrates his fortieth birthday, that’s not bad going. Socrates said famously that the unexamined life was not worth living. If he were alive today, he might have said that the unlived examination is not worth much either.

This new book focuses on a period of less than a month in which Nguyen, now teaching in a prestigious independent school that he calls Grace Grammar, accompanies a group of about a dozen senior students on a ‘justice tour’ to South Africa and Kenya. Nguyen was a reluctant participant. He notes that Africa had enough problems already without adding him to the list: Mandela had only recently died. I hoped they weren’t looking to me to fill the gap.