100 books like Still Time To Die

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. 

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… show more.

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… show more.

A former Apache helicopter pilot with multiple deployments under his belt, Don combines his, “been there, done that” with, “write what you know.”

Fans of relentless action and adrenaline should not pass up on Bentley’s Matt Drake series. Or his Jack Ryan Jr. books carrying on the Tom Clancy legacy. Or the next installment of the Mitch Rapp series as he takes over for Vince Flynn’s legacy. Seriously, Don is a busy man. 

In Without Sanction, Bentley’s protagonist experiences both mental and physical manifestations of PTSD, but it’s Don’s description of survivor’s guilt that is truly chilling in its accuracy and moving in its portrayal.

As you read the account of what Drake now has to live with, what he wrestles with on a daily basis, it brings about in the reader a sense of foreboding as close to the real thing as you might imagine.

Only those who… show more.

Foreign correspondent Hilsum uses unpublished diaries and interviews with Colvin’s friends, family, and colleagues to create an incomparable portrait of this indefatigable, daring, modern woman who was killed in 2012 while reporting in Syria. Like Gellhorn, Colvin reviled “objectivity shit,” and wrote about the horrors she witnessed in Kosovo, “when you’re physically uncovering graves…I don’t think there are two sides to a story. To me there is a right and a wrong, a morality.”  

The definitive account so far of the Syrian civil war, and of the insurgency against the dictatorship of Bashar Assad.  Sam Dagher combines a literary sensibility, deep knowledge of Syria, and acquaintance with the people on the ground, and an ability for tireless and dogged reporting and truth-seeking. The passages dealing with the Assad regime’s slaughter of arrested civilians in its jails are harrowing and are a reminder of the horrifying nature of this regime and the need for it to remain isolated and under pressure. At the same time, Dagher remains a cool and dispassionate analyst of the progress of the conflict, and of the factors which enabled the regime and its allies to prevail.  

This is another book of heart-pounding excitement from first page to last. Lex Harper is an assassin used by the British government’s shady department called The Pool, which has the remit to work in unconventional ways to achieve its goals.

The main storyline relates to a rogue soldier who persuades ISIS to support his desire to launch an attack on British soil. When The Pool learns what is happening, they hire Harper to neutralise him.

I wouldn’t rank it as highly as my other favourite picks because I found a few parts of the plot rather unrealistic, but the never-ending action and excitement dragged me through the book at high speed, so I definitely still enjoyed it overall and award it a place among the others.

Salma and her mom live in a refugee camp in Canada, and they miss Salma’s dad, who is still in Syria. Salma decides to cook a Syrian meal for her mom, but to make the meal a success, she needs to get help and ingredients from everyone in the village. I loved how making and sharing the food they miss from their home in Syria helped Salma and her mom start to build a new community. And the illustrations are as delicious as the food they cook! 

I cannot ignore the turmoil that has become Syria over the past decade. Many books have appeared about the peaceful demonstrations that turned violent and a civil war and a proxy war for Iran, Russia, the US, and various Arab states. This book provides a detailed history of how Syria descended into such violence.  It gave me a detailed understanding of how the ‘Opposition’ to the Asad government emerged in the country. And engages with the stories of the Opposition fighters in their exile in adjacent countries. Concluding that the war is not yet over, it provides some hope for those of us who watch from a distance as Russia and Iran reposition and redeploy in response to other critical global events.