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Patrick Leigh Fermor strolled across a Europe in 1933 that would become almost unrecognizable 10 years later.

Mr. Lapierre was among the last of a generation of European journalists, including Ryszard Kapuscinski and Patrick Leigh Fermor, who witnessed World War II firsthand and later channeled those experiences into long careers as foreign correspondents, travel writers and popular historians, making sense of the horrors of that war by documenting the world it left in its wake.

His account may remind readers of past travelogues such as Patrick Leigh Fermor’s “A Time of Gifts” or John Steinbeck’s “A Russian Journal,” both of which dip a toe in the Black Sea’s waters, but as Mühling points out, the sea has been an object of fascination for foreign writers since the time of Strabo and Herodotus.

I’m fond of a slightly overwritten travel book called “A Time of Gifts” by English writer Patrick Leigh Fermor.

It recounts in striking detail a walk across half of Europe undertaken by the young Leigh Fermor in 1933.