Against all odds, women journalists have built a robust tradition of telling the truth and getting to the heart of the story no matter the obstacles. In a world where the Fourth Estate is ever more crucial, the history of female reporters is all the more relevant as a source of information and inspiration for the next generation of correspondents. As a woman’s historian and passionate supporter of freedom of the press I’m always on the lookout for great histories of these intrepid reporters whose lives also happen to make for great reads.
I wrote
First to the Front: The Untold Story of Dickey Chapelle, Trailblazing Female War Correspondent
From World War II through early Vietnam, groundbreaking photojournalist and war correspondent Dickey Chapelle pursued dangerous assignments that male colleagues…
Vietnam was a big war, as they say, and though it ended almost 50 years ago, its full story has yet to be told. However, many of its pieces lay in the much-overlooked yet incredibly nuanced reporting that women did in the war.
Elizabeth Becker’s book explores the legacy of three of Vietnam’s unsung journalistic heroes. Each covered the war with a different angle, sense of purpose, and understanding of its—and their—place in geopolitical history.
Becker’s vivid writing puts you next to photojournalist Catherine Leroy in the plane as she prepares to jump with the 173rd Airborne Brigade in the war’s only airborne assault. Readers can almost hear the glasses clinking with ice around the Hotel Continental pool while intellectual Frances Fitzgerald shrewdly plums the unsuspecting diplomatic class for details that she’ll weave into her groundbreaking long-form reporting on the war. And my only heart nearly stopped the minute Kate Webb was captured by the Viet Cong while on assignment for UPI near the Cambodian border.
Each of these women captured a part of the Vietnam War that no one else did. Yet historians and history readers have largely ignored their unique insights into this consequential conflict. Becker’s book brings their stories to the forefront of discussions of this pivotal era with a band.
The long buried story of three extraordinary female journalists who permanently shattered the official and cultural barriers to women covering war.
Kate Webb, an Australian iconoclast, Catherine Leroy, a French dare devil photographer, and Frances FitzGerald, a blue-blood American intellectual, arrived in Vietnam with starkly different life experiences but one shared purpose: to report on the most consequential story of the decade.
At a time when women were considered unfit to be foreign reporters, Frankie, Catherine and Kate paid their own way to war, arrived without jobs, challenged the rules imposed on them by the military, ignored the belittlement and…
What can I say? I cried more than a few times reading Lindsey Hilsum’s humanizing and deeply personal biography of Marie Colvin. Hilsum’s brilliant portrait paints a figure that burns a little too brightly with life to live long in this world of ours.
She took her first reporting job with UPI and then transferred to the Sunday Times where she garnered the Sunday Times where she garnered the reputation of the kind of reporter who could get stories that no one else could. She was the first to interview Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi, and Hilsum’s heart-pounding description put me right in the bunker with her as she nervously clicked on her tape recorder for the interview under the watchful gaze of several armed guards. From there, Colvin covered some of the 1990s' most consequential combat zones, reflecting the chaos that ensued from the dissolution of the Soviet Union. In Bosnia, Chechnya, and Beirut, she put herself in the line of fire to get the story.
As is the case with so many combat reporters, she developed PTSD, which she medicated with alcohol. Fuel-injected with an ever greater sense of duty to cover these wars that would have otherwise received little attention in the American press, this vicious cycle led Colvin to be ever more reckless in journalistic practice. In the end, Colvin paid the ultimate price for her pursuit of the truth. While covering civil unrest in Syria, she, along with several other journalists, came under targeted artillery fire by government forces. Several were injured, and Colvin, along with a French photojournalist, were killed.
Hilsum’s biography not only details an extraordinary and ultimately poignantly tragic life but also the post-Cold War evolution of geopolitics as seen through the eyes of one of the era’s most brilliant reporters.
A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice. Finalist for the Costa Biography Award and long-listed for the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence. Named a Best Book of 2018 by Esquire and Foreign Policy. An Amazon Best Book of November, the Guardian Bookshop Book of November, and one of the Evening Standard's Books to Read in November
"Now, thanks to Hilsum’s deeply reported and passionately written book, [Marie Colvin] has the full accounting that she deserves." --Joshua Hammer, The New York Times
The inspiring and devastating biography of Marie Colvin, the foremost war reporter of her generation, who was killed…
Whenever I give a talk about Dickey Chapelle, I’m always asked why she did it. Why did she risk her life for so many years to cover conflict? I, too, wondered this same thing when I started writing about her, and in truth, I didn’t have a clue.
I began to turn to accounts by other women photojournalists for insight, and I found a great deal in this book. Like Chapelle, Addario has an incredible capacity to connect with those she photographs. There is a palpable sense of empathy in her work—and one that is not easily come by.
From Afghanistan to Iraq, Libya to Pakistan, Addario put herself in harm's way to capture the story—and she brought me as a reader right along with her. Through her lens, I was better able to see the geopolitical forces that shape individuals' lives, the stakes they face, and their bravery in confronting them every day.
And, like Chapelle, Addario paid the price for her drive to be as close to the story as possible when, in 2011, she was captured by pro-Qaddafi forces in Libya. Held captive for several days, she didn’t know if she would survive. With vivid detail, she describes the resilience and camaraderie that helped her and her fellow captors endure the ordeal, as well as the psychological toll it took on all of them.
Like Chapelle, it is the people whom she covers that draw Addario back to her camera again and again. It is an overwhelming need to shine a light on the whole of their stories that made both of them risk everything.
“An unflinching memoir . . . [that] offers insight into international events and the challenges faced by the journalists who capture them.” —The Washington Post
War photographer Lynsey Addario’s memoir is the story of how the relentless pursuit of truth, in virtually every major theater of war in the twenty-first century, has shaped her life. What she does, with clarity, beauty, and candor, is to document, often in their most extreme moments, the complex lives of others. It’s her work, but it’s much more than that: it’s her singular calling.
Lynsey Addario was just finding her way as a young…
Pour yourself a double before cracking open Clarissa Ward’s outstanding memoir. A polyglot who seems to have been imbued with very little fear from birth, Ward has an incredible capacity to find the heart of the story, whether it’s in the middle of Moscow or the center of a Bangladeshi river. As a reader, her experiences and prose swept me along as she dove into some of the world’s most consequential combat zones.
But wrapped in this non-stop adrenaline rush is a rare account of the cost of this kind of life on reporters. More than any of the other books on this list, Ward explores the toll born by combat journalists. With heartrending detail, she delves into the death of so many friends and colleagues who made up her world that seemed to crumble a little more with each of their passings. Equally moving are her nuanced descriptions of those who are caught in the crossfire of the conflicts she covered with empathy and rare expertise.
Nor did she escape unscathed. Like so many combat reporters, Ward suffered from symptoms like those of post-traumatic stress syndrome. Her role as an objective observer made these circumstances that much harder to accept. As she wrote in her book, “The reality is we are not there to solve the problem; we are there to illuminate it.”
Like Ward, Chapelle struggled with this dilemma of being so close to so much suffering yet being unable to mitigate those who were harmed. And, the two women consoled themselves in the hope that their reporting would be that balm. As Ward writes, “I told myself that if just ten people saw my story and felt moved to care about Syria, then it was worth it.”
I am certainly counted among those who were moved, though based on Ward’s impeccable reporting, I am sure there are more than ten of us.
“On All Fronts: The Education of a Journalist beautifully outlines . . . what it means to seek the truth. It gave me a new faith in the power of reporting.” —Oprah Winfrey
The recipient of multiple Peabody and Murrow awards, Clarissa Ward is a world-renowned conflict reporter. In this strange age of crisis where there really is no front line, she has moved from one hot zone to the next. With multiple assignments in Syria, Gaza, Ukraine, and Afghanistan, Ward, who speaks seven languages, has been based in Baghdad, Beirut, Beijing, and Moscow. She has seen and documented the…
As a kid, I wanted to be Lauren Bacall when I grew up. I watched To Have and Have Not almost weekly, emulating her sultry moves as “Slim” and wishing that I too could one day undermine the Nazis in a little black dress.
I don’t regret my choice of teenage role model, but I do wish I had known about Lee Miller back then, who would have offered a real-life example of a femme fatale fighting for good with her talents. However, rather than grit and charm, Miller used her camera to expose the true cost of fascism.
Carolyn Burke's biography takes us on an extraordinary journey through Miller’s life—from her days as a model to her work as a war correspondent. Miller had an uncanny ability to connect with the subjects of her photographs, creating a bridge between their world and ours.
During World War II, Miller’s work was groundbreaking. She was one of the few female war correspondents, and she took her role seriously, often putting herself in danger to get the story. Present at the liberation of the Dachau concentration camp, Miller’s photographs are hauntingly powerful, conveying the unparalleled atrocity of the Nazi genocidal campaign against Jews as well as the deep scars left on her by the horrors she witnessed.
This is not just a biography; it’s a testament to the indomitable spirit of a woman who defied conventions and broke barriers. Through Burke’s meticulous research and evocative storytelling, we come to understand what drew Miller to the heart of the conflict, time and time again.
Lee Miller's life embodied all the contradictions and complications of the twentieth century: a model and photographer, muse and reporter, sexual adventurer and domestic goddess, she was also America's first female war correspondent. Carolyn Burke, a biographer and art critic, here reveals how the muse who inspired Man Ray, Cocteau, and Picasso could be the same person who unflinchingly photographed the horrors of Buchenwald and Dachau. Burke captures all the verve and energy of Miller's life, from her early childhood trauma to her stint as a Vogue model and art-world ingenue, from her harrowing years as a war correspondent to…
From World War II through early Vietnam, groundbreaking photojournalist and war correspondent Dickey Chapelle pursued dangerous assignments that male colleagues avoided, pioneering a radical style of reporting focused on the humanity of the oppressed. She documented post-war Eastern Europe, marched with the South Vietnamese Army, and accompanied Castro in the Sierra Maestra Mountains.
The first reporter accredited with the Algerian National Liberation Front, Chapelle survived torture in a communist Hungarian prison, faked her own kidnapping, and endured the mockery of male peers. She died on assignment in Vietnam in 1965, the first American female journalist killed in combat. My book uncovers her remarkable life and enduring impact on history.
This book is set in Montauk, under looming threat from a warming climate and overdevelopment. Now outsider Clancy, a thirty-six-year-old claims adjuster scarred by his orphan childhood, has inherited an unexpected legacy: the power to decide the fate of Montauk’s last parcel of undeveloped land. Everyone in town has a stake in the outcome, among them Julienne, an environmentalist and painter fighting to save the landscape that inspires her art; Theresa, a bartender whose trailer park home is jeopardized by coastal erosion; and Molly and Billy, who are struggling to hold onto their property against pressure to sell. When Clancy…
The Stark Beauty of Last Things is set in Montauk, the far reaches of the famed Hamptons, an area under looming threat from a warming climate and overdevelopment. Now outsider Clancy, a thirty-six-year-old claims adjuster scarred by his orphan childhood, has inherited an unexpected legacy: the power to decide the fate of Montauk's last parcel of undeveloped land.
Everyone in town has a stake in the outcome, among them Julienne, an environmentalist and painter fighting to save the landscape that inspires her art; Theresa, a bartender whose trailer park home is jeopardized by coastal erosion; and Molly and Billy, who…