Lapierre renovated a 1927 Nash that his mother gave him and decided to travel across the United States during his summer holidays.

He hitch-hiked throughout the U.S. living an adventurous existence, wrote articles, washed windows in churches, gave lectures, and even found a job as a siren cleaner on a boat returning to Europe.

When Lapierre was eighteen, he received a Fulbright Scholarship to study economics at Lafayette College in Easton, Pennsylvania, where he was graduated in 1952.

Lapierre sold the Chrysler for $400 in San Francisco and bought two tickets on the SS President Cleveland for Japan.

They worked their way across Japan, Hong Kong, Thailand, India, Pakistan, Iran, Turkey and Lebanon.

One day in the cafeteria he met a young American corporal, Larry Collins, a Yale graduate and draftee.

In this book they mixed the modern technique of investigation journalism with the classical methods of historical research.

Lapierre was proud that after spending a great deal of time in Jerusalem he knew each alley, square, street, and building in the Holy City intimately.

Lapierre donated half the royalties he earned from this book to support several humanitarian projects in Kolkata, including refuge centres for leper and polio children, dispensaries, schools, rehabilitation workshops, education programs, sanitary actions, and hospital boats.

Lapierre also funded a primary school in Oriya Basti, one of the settlements described in Five Past Midnight in Bhopal.

Each summer, while at his grandparents' Atlantic coast beach house, he marvelled at the wonders of his uncle's American cars.

When he was a Fulbright exchange student at Lafayette College, he bought, for thirty dollars, a convertible Chrysler Royal he found in a junkyard.

Later, in a Rolls-Royce he bought on his fortieth birthday, he drove from Bombay to Saint Tropez via Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iran and Turkey.