An eye-opening, deeply felt memoir that brings us behind the cameras in the world’s deadliest hot spots.
Veteran TV war correspondent Fletcher describes several decades of risking life, limb and sanity to chase down stories on the front lines.
Now Tel Aviv bureau chief for NBC News, the author gives a sobering but unforgettable account of a life spent sifting through some of humanity’s worst atrocities. He explains his career choice in part as a way of confronting the loss of much of his extended family in the Holocaust. Spurning a comfortable desk job, he began as a BBC correspondent in the early 1970s and headed out into the field. There he discovered he had a nose for news. More than once, it almost cost him his head, but it also enabled him to submit memorable, prizewinning reports from war zones like Kosovo, Somalia, Cyprus, Rwanda and the Middle East, where the author has lived with his wife and family since the first Gulf War. Although Fletcher provides ample tales of heavy drinking and womanizing with colorful colleagues in his early years, much of his work involved slogging through mud, mountain and jungle in search of grim stories of famine and slaughter. He describes watching colleagues blown to bits by land mines a few feet in front of him, interviewing murderous Somali warlords and witnessing genocide up close in places like Kosovo and Rwanda. Perhaps his most chilling interviews have been clandestine West Bank meetings with Palestinian terrorists dedicated to killing Jews, including the author’s own wife and children. Through it all, Fletcher tries but cannot fully explain his love for a job that has brought him face-to-face with human suffering and mass carnage. But he does candidly acknowledge the emotional toll it has taken, as well as the sheer luck that has kept him alive.
An eye-opening, deeply felt memoir that brings us behind the cameras in the world’s deadliest hot spots.Pub Date: March 4, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-312-37118-0
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2008
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
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
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