Heroes is a vivid, engrossing and sometimes blackly amusing personal story covering the periods for which John Pilger's journalism is renowned. The "heroes"of the narrative are the ordinary people he has witnessed coping in difficult and often brutal conditions: dissidents in the Soviet Union; victims of conflicts in Vietnam, Cambodia, Africa, India, the Middle East and Central America. They also include the Irish labouring generation of his great-great-grandfather, transported in irons to Australia for uttering "unlawful oaths."