Foreign Correspondents' Top Ten
Book review by
John Maxwell Hamilton
Judith Paterson
John Maxwell Hamilton is dean of the Manship School of Mass Communication at Louisiana State University.
Judith Paterson is a professor at the University of Maryland College of Journalism.
This tormented, brooding journalist could as easily
have been a poet. In 1944, while recuperating from wounds he received covering
the battle of Salerno for Life magazine, Belden wrote this account of the
fighting he witnessed in the Asian and European theaters. The drama comes
as much from his passions as from his on-the-scene reporting of the falsehoods,
chaos and bewilderment of war. The volume is virtually forgotten today — much
like Belden, who drifted out of the profession in the 1950s.
Hiroshima
By John Hersey
On August 6, 1945, the first atomic bomb ever
dropped on a city killed 100,000 people in Hiroshima. Among those who lived,
skin fell off bones, boils erupted, sickness and fatigue lasted a lifetime.
Told via the memories of six survivors, Hersey's 1946 account of the destruction
lays bare the savagery of America's then-new technology. A new concluding
chapter, written for the 1985 edition, adds a message of hope with stories
of survival and the human capacity for regeneration.
Dispatches
By Michael Herr
This drug-infused, hip-talking "war sucks" take
on Vietnam, originally written by Herr for Esquire in 1967 and 1968, made
him a cult hero and gave us our image of a time and place where nobody
wanted to be. "Spooky," he said, "everything up there was spooky." It took
him another 10 years to turn that spookiness into a masterpiece of the
new journalism, a better depiction than any of the movie screenplays that
have been lifted from it.
Salvador
By Joan Didion
In the summer of 1982, this veteran literary journalist
toured revolutionary El Salvador for two weeks and watched her own personal
dread mirror the realities of a country being "demoralized, undone, humiliated"
by fear. No need to analyze this one. Just follow the Dantesque traveler
to hell and watch the bodies pile up. "Terror," as Didion writes in her
1983 account, "is the given of the place."
Crossing the Line:
A Year in the Land of Apartheid
By William Finnegan
Working his way around the world, Finnegan, a
27-year-old surfer and magazine travel writer, landed a teaching job in
a high school for "coloreds" in Cape Town, South Africa. The year he spent
there, 1980 to 1981, turned out to be filled with violence and student
demonstrations. Through the eyes of a narrator losing his youthful illusions,
Finnegan's 1986 book remains the best we have of "ordinary life" under
apartheid. ###
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