His parents moved to New York City that same year, where his father worked for a Wall Street bank.

His first important book, Bonjour Blanc: A Journey Through Haiti (1992), an amalgam of history and adventure, was recommended by J. G. Ballard as "hair-raising but hugely entertaining", and by the film director Jonathan Demme as "a great and abiding classic".

His book, Primo Levi (2002),[1] a biography, took 10 years to write and is seen today as the definitive life of the Italian writer and concentration camp survivor.

(A centenary edition of the biography was published in 2019, fully updated and with a new preface, as Primo Levi: The Elements of a Life.)

In 2011, he donated the memoir, Fall and Rise of a Rome Patient, to Oxfam’s "OxTravel" project, a collection of UK articles by 36 writers.