One has to read autobiography with a skeptical eye. Most memoirists, being human, tend to present themselves in the best possible light and to employ selective amnesia, especially when a ghostwriter is holding the pen. That caveat out of the way, Craig Kielburger’s Free the Children – really more of a travelogue than a memoir – is a remarkable portrait of the young activist and his journey to India, Pakistan, Thailand, and Bangladesh to get a first-hand look at child labour.

Travelling with Alam Rahman, a 24-year-old Bangladesh-born friend, Kielburger spent seven weeks in South Asia, not only talking with members of human-rights organizations, but meeting with child labourers themselves. One of the strengths of Free the Children (both the book and Kielburger’s organization of the same name) is that he connects with these children on a level that bureaucrats cannot. He remembers their names, continues to exchange letters with them, and has tried to track them down on his return visits to Asia.

A recent feature in Saturday Night magazine made Kielburger look like a pawn in a game orchestrated by his parents. Here mom and dad look like typical parents who overpacked his suitcase and worry that he’s not eating enough. That’s to be expected but, frankly, it’s hard to see how they could have pulled his strings from across the ocean.

Young-adult novelist and collaborator Kevin Major succeeds marvellously in seeing the odyssey through a 13-year-old’s eyes, while sparing the reader a 13-year-old’s prose. This isn’t gee-whiz naive observation – Kielburger’s (Major’s?) description of the child sex trade in Bangkok is appropriately sickening, for example, and his eyewitness account of a raid on an Indian carpet factory (activists liberated the children enslaved there) give this book the high drama and emotion of a top-flight thriller.