I continually return to Jake Warga’s pieces. For their sheer versatility, human warmth and unpredictability they’re topnotch. They’re also snapshot-vivid; you don’t need to put on your “Avatar” 3D glasses to enjoy the stereoscopic vision of a writer-producer who’s also an accomplished photographer.

Warga’s latest travel piece presents four terrific “postcards” from West Africa. He starts in Allada, Benin by describing a child nursing from his mother, keeping eye contact with Warga the “white man in the room,” while Warga can‘t take his eyes off the boy and ends up making conversation with grownups, lying about having his own twin children Piglet and Roo!

From a kid at his mother’s breast, Warga travels northwest to a young girl, a hooker soliciting him in Ouagadougou, Burkana Faso. Sure, his description of “the choking red dust of a cruel African street” is melodramatic, but he handles the subject of child prostitution in a polygamous society with his usual sagacious subtlety.

His third postcard focuses on a camel ride in Marrakesh, Morocco. Here’s some typical Warga prose: “Riding a camel is kind of like flying. The takeoffs and landings are thrilling, but unless there’s a really good movie on, the flight itself is rather dull.” He ends this passage with a sly allusion to Julius Caesar’s famous Latin sentence about a short war: “I saw, I rode, I want down.”

Like most tourists traveling in countries where they don’t know the language, he feels like a child. On a train speeding somewhere through Morocco late at night he says, “I will become slim from nibbling on the same endless baguette.”

This kind of writing is as good as public radio gets. Three cheers and five stars for Jake Warga!