A somewhat flawed, yet largely enthralling, story about life on the front lines of journalism.
Veteran broadcast journalist Dobbs tells the behind-the-scenes story of his profession in some of the most dangerous places in the world.
The author tells readers in his introduction about the nature of his book–these are “war stories,” he says, or if they prefer, “bar stories” or even “letters home from the field.” Dobbs paints a clear picture of how a news team operates in these places, sometimes courageously, sometimes stupidly, sometimes both. However, at times, when Dobbs is a bit too in love with his jokes and marks a real knee-slapper with an exclamation point, it might seem like this is more the made-up autobiography of a character, like Tom Grunick, William Hurt’s character from Broadcast News. There are times when Dobbs overexplains simple ideas, taking an entire paragraph to describe the fairly familiar geography of England and Ireland. He makes no effort to hide the adrenaline-junkie instinct that may seem stereotypical of journalists covering dangerous situations–that these professionals sometimes jump in where bullets are flying not necessarily because it’s a story that needs telling, but simply because it’s exciting. At other times, Dobbs seems nothing less than an expert in his field, combining historical knowledge with practical experience about surviving in some of the world’s worst places. Taken as a whole, the faults and triumphs paint an honest portrait of someone trying to adjust to the rigors of his profession just like anyone else, except those rigors involve navigating battle-torn streets in Europe and the Middle East, interviewing gun-runners and trying to convince the girlfriend of a convicted killer to give you an on-camera exclusive.
A somewhat flawed, yet largely enthralling, story about life on the front lines of journalism.Pub Date: Aug. 18, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-4401-5276-4
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 23, 2010
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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