A thoughtful account of the excitement and pitfalls of war reporting.
A London-based foreign correspondent looks back on a career covering life in war zones.
Now chief international correspondent for CNN, Ward, who has won an Emmy and two Peabody Awards, was the only child of a wealthy American mother and a British investment banker father who separated when she was young. Raised first in New York and then in London, the author studied comparative literature at Yale until 9/11 inspired her to seek a career in journalism. Beginning with an overnight desk assistant's job at Fox News, where she experienced the “pervasive sexism” others have reported there, she worked her way up in journalism, adding Arabic to the five languages she already knew. Along the way, she spent time in Moscow, Baghdad, and Beirut, sometimes embedded with troops and sometimes hanging out in hotels with other journalists waiting for a story to break. Her descriptions of her experiences at all the sites are vivid and precise. Among the assignments that clearly meant the most to Ward were her several stints in Syria, where several sources to whom she became close disappeared, leaving her both bereft and conscious of her own privilege as a foreign journalist able to leave the country. Even more than her other jobs, the time in Syria taught her that “the idea of 'making a difference' in journalism is as seductive as it is dangerous….The reality is that we are not there to solve the problem, we are there to illuminate it.” Although Ward focuses more on her assignments than her inner life, it's obvious that as her time on the job continued, she suffered physical and emotional tolls, and the risk of “burning out amid one high-pressure trip after another” became higher. At the end of the book, she writes about how, after a brief respite for a marriage and the birth of a baby following a pregnancy that placed her at risk of contracting malaria in Bangladesh, she was back in the field in Afghanistan.
A thoughtful account of the excitement and pitfalls of war reporting.Pub Date: April 14, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-525-56147-7
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: Dec. 14, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
PERSPECTIVES
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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