Here are 75 books that On the Front Line fans have personally recommended if you like
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I have no expertise in the military – I wish I did. But I have incredible respect for their work. I remember reading about the death of Oz Schmid, a bomb disposal officer who was killed in Afghanistan. It was the bravery of his widow, Christina, discussing the appalling lack of equipment and her quiet dignity that touched me profoundly. I asked myself, what can I do to help? Being a writer, I decided to write about it. I quickly realised that I needed an insider’s insight, and found Troll through Felix Fund, the bomb disposal charity. Troll and I wrote the play Later, After, seeing it performed was the proudest moment of my career.
Most books about the military are written by men. But I was fascinated by this practical tip-based book by journalist Rosie Garthwaite. Wonderful anecdotes amongst real gems for staying safe in dangerous places. I also used it as research for one of my novels about a female war correspondent in Afghanistan.
Everyone needs this book if they want to know how to get out of difficult situations whether at home or abroad. Written by Rosie Garthwaite, whose career as a journalist started in war-torn Basra, this book combines practical advice with contributions from many journalists and commentators including Rageh Omar and John Simpson, who share their own experience and advice on surviving in difficult and dangerous situations. Topics include how to avoid being misunderstood; how to avoid bombs and booby traps; how to escape from a riot; how to deal with frostbite and heat exhaustion; how to avoid trouble in sex,…
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.
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…
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…
K. Lee Lerner is an author, editor, and producer of science and factual media, including four editions of the Gale Encyclopedia of Science and the Encyclopedia of Espionage, Intelligence, and Security. His expansive writing on science, climate change, disasters, disease, and global issues has earned multiple book and media awards, including books named Outstanding Academic Titles. An aviator, sailor, and member of the National Press Club in Washington, his two global circumnavigations and portfolio of work in challenging and dangerous environments reveal a visceral drive to explore and investigate. With a public intellectual's broad palate and a scientist's regard for evidence-based analysis, Lerner dissects and accessibly explains complex issues.
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.
"If I die, don't cry for me—because I was fighting for what I love."—Irma Flaquer
On a quiet October evening in 1980, Guatemalan journalist Irma Flaquer, returning to her downtown apartment after a visit with her four-year-old grandson, was dragged from her car, never to be seen again. Founder of the first Guatemalan Human Rights Commission, she was a crusading reporter who did not tolerate corruption or repression. Best known for her weekly column that ran for over twenty years in various Guatemalan newspapers—Lo Que Otros Callan or "What Others Don't Dare Write"—Flaquer criticized presidents, politicians, and the heads of…
Tap Dancing on Everest, part coming-of-age memoir, part true-survival adventure story, is about a young medical student, the daughter of a Holocaust survivor raised in N.Y.C., who battles self-doubt to serve as the doctor—and only woman—on a remote Everest climb in Tibet.
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.
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…
“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…
I am a Bangkok-based journalist from San Francisco, California, reporting news from Asia since 1978 and winner of Columbia University's Foreign Correspondent's Award. My work, including this book, has taken me to Tibet, India, Nepal, Laos, Vietnam, Afghanistan, Sri Lanka, New York, and elsewhere. Fragments of people and their distant voices are the behavior and quotes that inspire. Slices, starting at random moments and ending in bleak locations, fascinate and hypnotize. And transcribing handwritten notes, impressions, and exclusive interviews, create my RocknRolla lyrics.
Being a foreign correspondent in the so-called "developing world" is complicated in a myriad of ways, and journalists often become so deep into the story that their needs become strangely surgical, legal, and surreal.
Need some specific quotes to describe what is happening amid a bloodbath? Want to profile victims of torture and slaughter? Behr's book brings you into his experience as a foreign correspondent for Newsweek in Africa and other media work in a way few other reporters would like to admit -- except to each other.
This foreign correspondent's book gives an account of the author's time in China and South-East Asia during the 1960s and 1970s when he was South-East Asian Bureau Chief for "Newsweek".
As someone who loves my work, I’ve noticed that in fiction when a woman is successful at her career, often that career mainly functions as a source of guilt or stress. Fictional working women spend a lot of time second guessing their choices, and, hey, it is hard to balance work and family. Women are torn in multiple directions. But I also believe it’s okay to love your job. It’s okay to find joy in it and to not beat yourself up. I find deep satisfaction in writing, and I enjoy reading about characters who know the rush of doing a job well.
I’ve never read anything quite like this novel centering on a female photographer, Helen Adams, covering the Vietnam War. Years after reading it, I can still picture scenes and, I swear, feel the heaviness of the air and hear the fruit falling from the trees. Soli has talked about how she got tired of reading wonderful novels where the men went off and had wartime adventures and the women just dropped off the page. So she wrote her own wartime saga.
Helen Adams never drops off the page—she leaps off them. The writing is as lush as the landscape, and you’ll fall entirely into the world of the book. There’s war and treachery and duty and passion, and nothing is ever simple.
A New York Times Best Seller! A New York Times Notable Book!
A unique and sweeping debut novel of an American female combat photographer in the Vietnam War, as she captures the wrenching chaos and finds herself torn between the love of two men.
On a stifling day in 1975, the North Vietnamese army is poised to roll into Saigon. As the fall of the city begins, two lovers make their way through the streets to escape to a new life. Helen Adams, an American photojournalist, must take leave of a war she is addicted to and a devastated country…
Meet Lev Gleason, a real-life comics superhero! Gleason was a titan among Golden Age comics publishers who fought back against the censorship campaigns and paranoia of the Red Scare. After dropping out of Harvard to fight in World War I in France, Gleason moved to New York City and eventually…
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.
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…
“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…
While I was child growing up in London, the war was a powerful presence in my life. It was there in the films we watched, in the comics my brothers read, and in my vague understanding of what it meant to be British. It was not a subject we ever studied at school and as an adult I’ve always felt frustrated by my inadequate knowledge of this world-changing conflict. When I first had the idea of writing about the six remarkable women who pioneered the way for female war journalists, it wasn’t just their personal stories that drew me in but the chance to learn more about WW2 itself.
Some readers may know about the late great Martha Gellhorn through her dramatically volatile relationship with the novelist Ernest Hemingway. But she was a fierce and passionate writer of fiction herself, and when I discovered her collection of war journalism I realised that she ranked and still ranks amongst the finest of war correspondents. Even decades after the event, Gellhorn still has the power to shock and move us. By choosing to put the suffering of individuals at the heart of her writing, by the unflinching detail of her descriptions, evoking the sights, smells, and sensations of war she drives home her own profound conviction that while the fight against fascism had been necessary in her time, war itself is nearly always an evil, driven by the cynicism and greed of powerful old men.
A collection of “first-rate frontline journalism” from the Spanish Civil War to US actions in Central America “by a woman singularly unafraid of guns” (Vanity Fair).
For nearly sixty years, Martha Gellhorn’s fearless war correspondence made her a leading journalistic voice of her generation. From the Spanish Civil War in 1937 through the Central American wars of the mid-eighties, Gellhorn’s candid reporting reflected her deep empathy for people regardless of their political ideology. Collecting the best of Gellhorn’s writing on foreign conflicts, and now with a new introduction by Lauren Elkin, The Face of War is a classic of frontline…
I am a Bangkok-based journalist from San Francisco, California, reporting news from Asia since 1978 and winner of Columbia University's Foreign Correspondent's Award. My work, including this book, has taken me to Tibet, India, Nepal, Laos, Vietnam, Afghanistan, Sri Lanka, New York, and elsewhere. Fragments of people and their distant voices are the behavior and quotes that inspire. Slices, starting at random moments and ending in bleak locations, fascinate and hypnotize. And transcribing handwritten notes, impressions, and exclusive interviews, create my RocknRolla lyrics.
The fiercely independent spirit of surrealists and other people trying to survive during World War 2 permeates this opulent novel with ghostly quotes and rebellious beliefs.
Laced with angels, forests, dreams, and women, this diary becomes increasingly fraught with questions of obedience, patriotism, dictatorship, and freedom.
Will your own perceptions be radicalized or soothed by this war story?
Inspired by one of the finest lyrics in the English language, the anonymous, pre-Shakespearean "Tom o'Bedlam" ("By a knight of ghosts and shadows / I summoned am to tourney / Ten leagues beyond the wide world's end / Methinks it is no journey..."), Kenneth Patchen sets off on an allegorical journey to the furthest limits of love and murder, madness and sex. While on this disordered pilgrimage to H. Roivas (Heavenly Savior), various characters offer deranged responses, conveying an otherworldly, imaginative madness. A chronicle of violent fury and compassion, written when Surrealism was still vigorous and doing battle with psychotic…
What happens when a feminist who studies romance turns the lens on her own romantic adventures?
Loveland is about how the author came to understand this journey to the far country of love—dating, marriage, a forbidden love affair, an unusual love affair as an older woman—as part of a larger…
I’ve been curious about how reporters covered D-Day, and their interactions with the army, for more than thirty years, and my research into media-military relations, begun in earnest fifteen years ago has led to more than a dozen archives in several countries. Most accounts suggest that the press and the military fully cooperated during World War II, but documentary evidence reveals a far more nuanced story, with far more conflict between officials and the press than is supposed. After publishing work about the campaign in French North Africa, and a book about Ed Kennedy’s scoop of the German surrender, I’m now back where I started, working on a book about press coverage of D-Day.
Moseley was the Chief European Correspondent for The Chicago Tribunefor the last forty years of the twentieth century and although published by a university press is more a work of journalism than original scholarship.
It is based largely on the memoirs of an extraordinary number of reporters, many American but many more not. The real virtue of this book is how wide-ranging it is, covering the entire war and reporters from all of the combatant countries.
Readers get a vivid sense of how World War II was just that—a war that raged across the globe.
Luminary journalists Ed Murrow, Martha Gellhorn, Walter Cronkite, and Clare Hollingworth were among the young reporters who chronicled World War II's daily horrors and triumphs for Western readers. In this fascinating book, Ray Moseley, himself a former foreign correspondent who encountered a number of these journalists in the course of his long career, mines the correspondents' writings to relate, in an exhilarating parallel narrative, the events across every theater-Europe, Pearl Harbor, North Africa, and Japan-as well as the lives of the courageous journalists who doggedly followed the action and the story, often while embedded in the Allied armies.