An eighty-four-year-old man dying of cancer sits alone in a shabby hotel room in Portland in 1989, working to finalize the autobiography he started fifty years ago.

He is, reluctantly, a historian. He thinks the Peloponnesian War was a bar fight that got out of hand. He thinks the Mongols were very good at two things. He thinks most of what is taught about the Black Death is wrong. He's never been asked his opinions on Carthage, which is for the best.

In what sometimes feels like a past life, he was a dockworker, a scribe, a hobo, a translator, a piano player in a Chicago speakeasy. He has crossed the Atlantic three times and the Pacific once. He speaks several languages well and a dozen more badly. He has been married more times than he cares to count. He did fall in love once, with Margaret Fielding, who died in 1849, unfortunately.

He is not writing to be believed. He is writing because the alternative is to be forgotten.