MORE AFTER THE BREAK

Maxfield recollects the travails and triumphs, as well the moral challenges, of her work.

A reporter with experience covering news in both her home state of New Jersey and beyond, Maxfield is a seasoned veteran of the industry. She graduated from Columbia Journalism School and taught there as an adjunct professor and has worked for CNN. At the heart of journalistic practice is improvisation in the face of the unexpected, a key theme in this heartfelt memoir. She reflects with admirable candor on her diverse experiences, recollected in 10 vignettes that reflect on professional and personal dimensions of being a journalist. She discusses covering national news, like Hurricanes Katrina and Sandy, and smaller but equally poignant stories, like that of Yarelis Bonilla. Yarelis, a 5-year-old girl, had leukemia and was in dire need of a bone marrow transplant. The only viable candidate, her sister, Gisselle, lived in San Salvador and had great difficulty obtaining permission to enter the United States. Maxfield is impressively forthcoming about her own foibles. She charmingly calls a nightmare about her work a “newsmare”—and furnishes examples of her mistakes, including ones that resulted in some harm for those she interviewed. She reflects sincerely on her right to interject herself uninvited into the lives of those upon whom she reports: “Did they resent that I monopolized the time after a trauma when they should have been comforted by family and friends? Did they wish that their family’s struggle had been kept private? Did they feel they didn’t have a choice when I came knocking at the door?” Her answer—that such intrusions are justified because they “inspire introspection in our viewers”—is not a searching or plausible one and won’t likely be convincing to a public increasingly hostile to journalism as a profession. However, this memoir remains an edifying and humanizing peek into the life of a reporter.

An instructive, illuminating tableau of a reporter’s mission.