SHUTTERBABE

In four years as a photojournalist, Kogan charged into the world’s most dangerous places and fell in love with men from all over the northern hemisphere. Now in her 30s, she has written a smart-mouthed professional and sexual memoir.

Raised in Potomac, Maryland (a stable, functional period she covers in flashbacks), Kogan graduated from Harvard, moved immediately to Paris, and signed with a major photo agency. As a young, petite blonde, she was sent alone to photograph warring mujahideen in rural Afghanistan, heroin addicts in northern Europe, jungle scuffles in Zimbabwe, and the fall of Communism in Russia and Romania. She was never alone for long: each chapter in her chronology is named whatever man she was obsessed with at the time, and there were plenty more besides these. Her professional life is fascinating—and her photos of Romanian orphans are unforgettable—but she seems more concerned with romance, and keeps returning to the subject again and again in the best adolescent style. Kogan is a brilliant, clear-headed writer, breezing through details and dialogue as though each event happened yesterday, and creating real suspense through age-appropriate voice shifts: she recounts her early 20s in four-letter words, then gradually softens as she crosses that decade and grows up. The present-tense narrative alternates nicely with out-of-order flashbacks triggered by theme. To her credit, this senior member of Gen X never takes herself too seriously; if the last chapter leaves an odd aftertaste, it’s the sense that Kogan does not appreciate the rarity of a life of adventure and nonstop romance. Especially for readers with wanderlust, the book is an ideal companion to journalist Geraldine Brooks’s Foreign Correspondence (1997)—younger and tougher, but driven by a similar life trajectory.

Lucid, sardonic, exciting, if more than slightly immature.