The new book by longtime CBC foreign correspondent Patrick Brown could very easily have been three books. First, there are the bare bones of a confessional memoir. Brown is very frank about his struggles with alcoholism and what that meant for his work, health, and personal life. The book also has a lot of great stories from Brown’s stints reporting from Europe and Asia, covering wars and revolutions for most of the last three decades. And finally, Brown shares encounters with an assortment of dissidents in China, where he is currently based.
    Separately, each of these could have made for a fascinating read. Brown doesn’t have nearly the same level of celebrity as recent U.S. journalists-turned-memoirists like Barbara Walters (or even The New York Times’ David Carr, for that matter) but some of his insights on how his drinking affected his work (and vice versa) are fascinating and worthy of much more elaboration. And Brown’s international perspective may be unparalleled among Canadian journalists of his generation.
    But crammed together into one slim volume with chapters that leap from, for example, Brown’s denial of his drinking problem to the fall of the Berlin Wall to an interview with the Chinese gynecologist who first noticed an increase in AIDS cases in that country, it is jarring. And the connections that Brown tries to make between these strands – that particular chapter is entitled “Denial” – are too tenuous.
    Butterfly Mind is the rare book that leaves you wanting more, though not necessarily in a postive way. Like Brown’s reporting for CBC News, the book shows off his eye for that one telling detail or anecdote that can make a journalist’s story memorable. The jumpy structure – perhaps intended to replicate the life of a foreign correspondent or the short attention span of TV audiences – undermines the book’s strengths and should have been rethought.