A large part of my career has been devoted to foreign affairs. Edgar Snow, Negley Farson, and others whom I read as a young man kindled my interest. I have reported from overseas and at one point developed a specialty in reporting connections between American communities and events overseas. I have published a number of foreign correspondents’ memoirs that were buried in achieves or have been out-of-print and ignored. Most recently I wrote a history of foreign reporting. So, one can say that I have made a career of enjoying books like these.
I wrote
Journalism's Roving Eye: A History of American Foreign Reporting
Vincent Sheean’s memoir, published in 1935, stands out because it established a genre of memoir writing by foreign correspondents and because of its high literacy value.
“It has now been 30 years or more since Vincent Sheean wrote his Personal History,” commented Saturday Review of Literature editor Norman Cousins commented years later. “Many of the foreign correspondents have tried to convey the same sense of an intimate, interactive relationship with events and people that gave such luster to Sheean’s book.”
Sheean’s still-young career had spanned the globe for Europe, to North Africa and the Middle East, to the 1920s revolution in China, to the Soviet Union. His story was about himself insofar as it described how the news felt to him.
The events he witnessed proved the most important of the period in which he lived.
Sheean went on in a similar fashion after the book appeared, displaying almost surreal ability to understand the direction of events. Covering the Anschluss in Austria, he predicted World War I would follow.
Later he predicted and being on hand to witness Gandhi’s assassination by a Hindu.
The book made me want to be a foreign correspondent.
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In the mid-1930s a young journalist slipped past Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist forces into the northwest of China to find out if the Communists were Red Bandits or a legitimate political movement. Edgar Snow found they were the latter.
His eyewitness account – which read like an adventure story – reverberated around the globe and catapulted him to the top of his profession. As a correspondent for the Saturday Evening Post, he roved the world during World War II.
His career came crashing down with McCarthyism, but for two decades Snow remained one of the few American links with the People’s Republic of China. I was so inspired by Snow’s book that I later wrote his biography. In doing the research I was struck by how many Americans of his generation wanted to be like him.
The first Westerner to meet Mao Tse-tung and the Chinese Communist leaders in 1936, Edgar Snow came away with the first authorised account of Mao's life, as well as a history of the famous Long March and the men and women who were responsible for the Chinese revolution. Out of that experience came Red Star Over China, a classic work that remains one of the most important books ever written about the birth of the Communist movement in China.
This edition includes extensive notes on the military and political developments in China, further interviews with Mao Tse-tung, a chronology covering…
I vividly recall reading Farson’s book when I was a budding journalist.
Farson worked for the Chicago Daily News, a newspaper that is gone now, but was pioneer in modern American journalism, not only for its principled reporting but also its talented staff. The Daily News was the first to field a substantial corps of American reporters abroad. (The New York Times only did so much later.)
Farson was everywhere, which did not distinguish him from many other correspondents, but he was legendary for the high quality of his writing. His colleagues said he was a “combination Childe Harold and Captain from Castile.”
Unhappy with the request that he come back to Chicago to work awhile, he quit and went to Dalmatia to write Way of the Transgressor.
When the Great Depression hit and jobs were scarce, there was no point in hanging around at home.
“Prices in Europe were down to rock bottom,” wrote Albion Ross of his first overseas trip in 1930. “In addition, Mussolini’s government, for some inscrutable Fascist reason, was offering students a fantastic third-class railway ticket that took you from the Channel ports round and about through France and Italy for next to nothing.”
He found a spot in Berlin with the New York Evening Post and later The New York Times. Apart from a stint in the military during the war, he remained an overseas reporter for years.
His memoir is extraordinary because it is short on derring-do and long on sensitivity about what he witnessed. It is perhaps for this reason that neither Ross nor his book are much remembered. I would not have known about it if he had not been one of my professors in college.
Toward the end he writes, “I have been searching all my life to escape from the twentieth century, to escape from the predicament of modern mankind.”
After Dr. Shawn Jennings, a busy family physician, suffered a brainstem stroke on May 13, 1999, he woke from a coma locked inside his body, aware and alert but unable to communicate or move. Once he regained limited movement in his left…
Though largely forgotten, Jack Belden is one of the best war reporters in American history.
A tormented man, he had PTSD before the term existed. While recovering from wounds sustained during the Allied invasion of Italy, he wrote Still Time to Die. He wrote, “My life, more than that of anyone I know, has been spent in lonely wanderings among the dreary wastelands of war.”
He lived a raw life with regular Chinese soldiers. Of his sensations during a shelling with them, he wrote, “I was not only tingling with delirious excitement, but, to my great astonishment, I realized that I was almost panting with a sexual kind of pleasure, and I found myself leaning against the wind, surrendering to the rough caress of the sand, pulsing and throbbing and thrilling to the crashing, tumultuous orchestration of the shells which were now beating the earth about us with a punishing, orgiastic frenzy.”
Later forms of this sort of reporting can be found in New York Times Chris Hedges’s War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning. Wrote Hedges: “Casual encounters are charged with a raw, high-voltage sexual energy that smacks of the self-destructive lust of war itself.”
Another outstanding war reporter, who did not write books, but courageously thrust herself into danger was Marie Colvin, who perished covering the war in Syria. The 2005 documentary film Bearing Witness tells her story.
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Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. To ensure a quality reading experience, this work has been…
In Journalism’s Roving Eye, John Maxwell Hamilton – a former foreign correspondent and historian – provides an award-winning, definitive history of American foreign news gathering from its inception in colonial America to the present day. It chronicles the economic and technological advances that have influenced overseas coverage, as well as the cavalcade of colorful personalities who shaped American perceptions of the world across two centuries.
Tourists and local residents of St. Augustine will enjoy reading about the secret wonders of their ancient city that are right under their noses. Of course, that includes a few stray corpses and ghosts!
The Model Spy is based on the true story of Toto Koopman, who spied for the Allies and Italian Resistance during World War II.
Largely unknown today, Toto was arguably the first woman to spy for the British Intelligence Service. Operating in the hotbed of Mussolini's Italy, she courted danger…
