My favorite books on women journalists working in dangerous places

British army officer turned foreign correspondent for the BBC and Al Jazeera, Rosie Garthwaite has worked in some the world's toughest and most dangerous areas. In her book, How to Avoid Being Killed in a War Zone, Garthwaite offers practical tips for journalists, aid workers, business travelers, and others who find themselves caught up in the chaos of conflict and violence in volatile regions. More than a survival guide to tell you how to avoid landmines or amputate a bomb-shattered leg, the book is infused with Garthwaite's simultaneously intelligent, harrowing, and wry takes on perils she faced when working in Basra in Iraq and other hotspots.

Veteran war correspondent Elizabeth Becker, who wrote about covering the atrocities of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia in her book, When the War Was Over, now documents the stories of three women journalists who defied both bias and danger to cover the Vietnam War. Becker reveals how photojournalist Frances FitzGerald and reporters Kate Webb and Catherine Leroy struggled against special restrictions placed on them by military commanders, uncooperative male peers, and the perils of war to set new standards of excellence for all journalists engaged in the craft of reporting on wars and conflicts in dangerous places.

On the Front Line is an award-winning collection of stories by veteran war correspondent Marie Colvin. Prior to being targeted for assassination by the Syrian government in February 2012 while she covered the civil war there, Colvin's career and writing showed peerless courage in the pursuit of stories that revealed the inhumanities of war and civil strife. The book contains insightful accounts of interviews of Arafat and Gadaffi as well as her intimate reporting of fighting in Kosovo, Chechnya, East Timor, Afghanistan, Iraq, and the chaos of the Arab Spring uprisings. Blinded in one eye shrapnel while reporting on the Sri Lankan Tamil Tigers, Colvin's style and legendary courage live on in this select collection of her work.

June Carolyn Erlick, editor-in-chief for ReVista, the Harvard Review of Latin America, casts a seasoned journalist’s eye on the 1980 abduction of  Guatemalan journalist Irma Flaquer. Returning home, Flaquer was pulled from her car and was never seen again. Flaquer, a popular and respected journalist with an influential column, Lo Que Otros Callan or "What Others Don't Dare Write",  was also the founder of the first Guatemalan Human Rights Commission. Throughout her career, Flaquer survived beatings, car bombs, and drive-by assassination attempts that did not daunt her from doing her job as a reporter to expose Guatemalan suffering at the hands of their corrupt U.S.-backed government and the cost the Guatemalan people paid as Cold War pawns.

Lynsey Addario, a MacArthur Genius Grant winner, has spent a career finding truth through the lens of her camera. After documenting the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on the U.S., she braved danger to reveal both Taliban cruelties and the devastation caused by the chaotic war waged by the U.S. that followed. Addario's book. It's What I Do is more than just the inspirational personal story of a woman photojournalist, it provides witness to the horrors and injustice of war in hotspots like Iraq, Darfur, and the Congo. Her account of her kidnapping by pro-Qaddafi forces during the Libyan civil war exposes the dangers photojournalists face in dangerous places.