At first glance, retired Army officer Ralph Peters stands far apart from fellow writers Jack Kerouac (one of those sloppy beatniks) and Hunter Thompson (hardly a font of self-discipline).

Still, Kerouac helped to pioneer the genre of on-the-road writing, while Thompson polished the form. Now, with "Looking for Trouble," Peters has all but given the genre a glow.

OK, Peters writes from a different spot on the spectrum — from the point of view of an Army intelligence officer sent to sniff around the old Soviet Union and to dig into the drug culture in South America and Burma and Thailand, among other assignments in the '80s and '90s.

Sure enough, he writes a lot about the military and political stuff in the 20 or more countries described in this book. But in his vastly entertaining style — Peters also has written a bunch of well-received novels — he also puts across the sounds, sights and smells of each place in which he set foot. Here's a sample, from Pakistan in 1995:

"Rawalpindi is of less interest than it should be. An Anglican church is as threatened by fumes as by the local radicals, and traffic jams are the city's varicose veins. Everything but alcohol is for sale in narrow shop fronts, and donkeys drawing carts trot by advertisements for computers. Military cantonments occupy the best and best-tended property; the rest is frenetic blandness. The visitor notes that one of the advantages of the flowing male dress is that its wearers can squat down anywhere and piss without exposing themselves. And they do. No gutter is too public. (Life is rather more difficult for Pak women.)"

Some readers may be put off by Peters' colorful soldier talk. But a few pages later, the same readers may marvel at Peters' references to Russian novelists or painters, or to obscure but important historical turning points from a millennium ago.

In some passages, Peters uses the conservative political tone familiar to readers of his op-ed column in the conservative New York Post — sneering at the State Department, say. But a few pages later, Peters will condemn the lowly status of most Islamic women in blunt terms that would please any feminist.

It's hard to put down a book that has a chapter titled "Elvis, Buddha, and the Burrito of the Apocalypse." Indeed, the temptation in this review is to quote a third or more of "Looking for Trouble." But even if that were possible, such a review would rob the reader of the pleasure of sampling Peters' nuggets in the context of his book.

So read it. Savor it. At one point in his book, when Peters is talking about the old Soviet Union, he might well be describing his own book when he writes, "Ordering from the menu of the past, I'll take the vignettes and skip the epic."

Harry Levins of Manchester retired last year as Post-Dispatch senior writer.