"Although my tone implied deep understanding of complex issues," Patrick Brown writes of one report filed early in his career, "I have never been an expert on anything. I have spent my life going from place to place, always in a hurry, watching other people do things, and writing and talking about what they are doing."

The reporter is in Beirut in 1981, a "fireman" journalist responding to another international alarm, and is "cheerfully pontificating from the confident posture of one pretending he has seen it all." He is also, he admits, holed up during the off-hours in the bar in the Commodore, a "dingy, no-star" hotel that served as headquarters for the world's press in town to cover Lebanon's prolonged civil war.

Off-hours for Brown might include a few drinks in the morning, or the afternoon, or into the evening. It might also involve a wee-hours session featuring witticisms drawn from the misery of the hostage-takings then rendering the act of doing anything in Beirut, including drinking in a bar, a risk.

Here is Brown's own version of his gallows humour: "Four o'clock in the morning would find me hanging on to the piano screeching improvised hits for hostages. 'Please Release Me,' 'Some Islamic Evening,' 'Shia'll be Coming Round the Mountain,' and so on." Who would blame a journalist, given the dangers? "It is commonly supposed that some journalists drink heavily because of the dangerous and irregular lives they lead," he says. But he isn't buying it for a second: "One of the reasons I liked going to wars was that it gave me license and an excuse to drink."

Butterfly Mind is a compelling account of Patrick Brown's three decades as an intrepid reporter for CBC radio and television. As his Lebanon behaviour attests, while going to those various wars he was also waging one of his own – on alcoholism. Some of his most eloquent on-air work, it turns out, was done while dwelling south of the line of sobriety.

That he would simultaneously dismiss much of that legless reportage, declaring it self-aggrandizing and "gullible as well as careless," is typical of the book's tone. Butterfly Mind takes its title from a Chinese parable attributed to the ancient philosopher Zhuang Zhou. A man falls asleep and dreams he is a butterfly. Upon awakening, he wonders this: Am I man who dreamed he was a butterfly or am I a butterfly now dreaming he is a man?

For Brown, the parable speaks to the division within his own career: 15 or so years spent "flitting from country to country, crisis to crisis," and 15 or so years rooted in the complexity of China. He divides each chapter into half China, half elsewhere.

The flittings are lively. Brown has made it, often at the last minute, to a majority of the key world events of the last quarter-century. To name just a few, his "fireman" calls to Poland, for the Solidarity movement; to Berlin, for the toppling of the wall, to Cambodia, for the UN peacekeeping debacle, and to East Timor, for the agonizing final days of Indonesian rule, are captured. Intelligence and moral outrage, so evident in his often-powerful two-minute TV segments, informs his lean prose.

A couple of the individuals he encounters are also introduced. Sergio Vieria de Mello, a.k.a. "Serge the Urge," the dashing, silver-grey-haired UN "nation-builder," leaps off the page, with the follow-up detail – de Mello was killed in Iraq in 2003 – a sharp deflation. There is also a glancing portrait of Saleem Shaheen, an Afghan filmmaker who produces intriguing films that appeal to local sensibilities.

More on Saleem, and de Mello, would have been welcome. More tactile details about places and events, portraits of the various rogues and villains, do-gooders and heroes Brown encountered during those hasty calls might have enlivened Butterfly Mind. There is a curious non-visual quality to the writing, as if the author is expecting a camera to supply the images.

No surprise, the China half, while still full of travel, is more engaged with people, often the courageous few who challenge their authoritarian state. Brown has the leisure to meet AIDS doctors and fearless bloggers again and again, to develop a stronger sense of their characters.

The reportage, too, is excellent. The section where he employs the writings of Matteo Ricci, the 16th-century Jesuit who lived in China for decades, to explore the misperception that the nation, then or now, is receptive to having itself altered by interactions with the rest of the world, is especially interesting. He also predicts an unexpected trigger for change: "Some of the technology China is eagerly embracing today may have the potential to change China from the bottom up."

But Butterfly Mind is still too short by a hundred pages. The absences go beyond those reluctant details and unwillingness to create scenes to enrich the storytelling. Brown's blunt honesty, his wish to disclose, is matched and finally overcome by a seeming rectitude about his life. The list of personal details left out of the book is striking. Of his family, we learn only that he grew up in England and visited his mother, then suffering dementia, in her final weeks. Of his off-camera life, nothing is revealed. Brown mentions in passing that he divides his time between Bangkok and Beijing, but doesn't elaborate. Any professional friendships solidified over the decades or sustaining relationships with the CBC itself – the corporation went some distance to help its star journalist cure himself – are likewise undisclosed.

Were the book simply a journalist's memoirs, outwardly directed to the news stories he covered, this would be fine. But Brown, while certainly not needing to be a James Frey of fulsome confession, wants to narrate the tale of his alcoholism, presumably to explore the shared humanity through the most tried and true method: one person's epic, exhausting struggle. To do that, he must write his illness, rather than simply report it. For all its fine qualities, including its many dazzling travels, Butterfly Mind doesn't feel quite ready for that journey.