content: An amazing story of an innocent man's journey from the underworld of France to the underbelly of the penal colony of French Guiana in 1931. The movie, though excellent, pales in comparison to this incredible page turner that any author would be hard pressed to fabricate unless he lived it. Charierre (aka Papillon) sheds light on the beauty and brutality of humanity with touching insight and shrewd instinct. Depicting life and society on the inescapable islands in a straightforward fashion, Papillon paints a colorful, if not surreal, picture with humor and sheer agony. After nine escape attempts, the reader is left wondering how a man could have prevailed. Charierre's auto-biographical adventure is a testament to a good man's astounding mental capacity to survive the most hellish circumstances by his wit, ingenuity and imagination despite the odds of survival. A must read for the soul.