EL OFICIO DE NARRAR SIN MIEDO

Guatemalan journalist Whitbeck recounts his family’s multigenerational history in journalism as well as travels around the world in this genre-bending Spanish-language memoir.

There are few people who can say seeing a dead body changed their lives for the better, but for the author, it was a light-bulb moment. He was barely a teenager during Guatemala’s civil war in the late 1970s, and violence was everywhere; it was on his daily commute to school, peering out at a cadaver from the bus window, that his future solidified: He was going to be a journalist. After getting his master’s degree in journalism at Columbia University, Whitbeck worked his way up from covering natural disasters in Central America to becoming one of CNN’s senior foreign correspondents. In this memoir and travelogue, he recounts some of his most memorable reporting trips during his decadeslong career, including embedding with U.S. Army soldiers in Iraq, cutting his international journalism teeth at civilian protests in Haiti, and getting to hold the same pen that Gorbachev used to sign the documents dissolving the USSR. He attributes his success to his relentlessly curious nature but admits that journalism may well be his destiny: his ancestors include Spanish conquistador and chronicler Bernal Díaz del Castillo and American journalist Leonard F. Whitbeck, who covered conflicts between American troops and Indigenous leaders Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse. Whitbeck even devotes one of the book’s best chapters, an outlier of sorts, to detailing his own father’s involvement in the brief and bloody regime of Guatemalan president Efraín Ríos Montt.

As a narrator, Whitbeck’s greatest strengths are the palpable compassion and humility with which he undertakes the task of reporting on communities in crisis and the deft connections he makes to broader themes of the human condition. The author, who considers himself an introvert and identifies as gay, offers a self-conscious peek into the often opaque world of correspondent journalism; in particular, he’s refreshingly frank about facing racism and xenophobia as a Latino and a member of the Spanish-language press and about the complex traumas of his various sources across the world. His clean prose historically contextualizes his location-based essays without ever overwhelming the reader or deferring to an American perspective. He juxtaposes moments of levity, as when he tells of procuring equine transport in Afghanistan, listening to Coldplay while on assignment, and smoking cannabis for the first time, with the descriptions of the carnage he witnesses. The book isn’t chronological, and the way that Whitbeck jumps through time to suit his philosophizing about the human experience results in occasional passages that feel muddled or disconnected. The final chapter, however, is quite sentimental, ruminating on his life after leaving CNN and how he came to understand himself better through taking psychedelics, culminating in his ultimate takeaway: that death and disaster are simply part of the cycle of life.

An often compelling survey of a uniquely demanding career and the life lived around it, with stories that readers won’t find in the news.