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.
This book was a lifesaver for me as I began to explore media-military relations about a decade ago.
Briefly but authoritatively Sweeney charts the relationship between the American military and the media from the Revolutionary War to the early twenty-first century. Sweeney, a former journalist himself, also writes well and this is a joy to read.
The subtitle suggests Sweeney’s take on the subject, and Sweeney’s work generally has been invaluable to me and this book would be the place to start for anyone interested in the subject.
Because news is a weapon of war - affecting public opinion, troop morale, even strategy - for more than a century America's wartime officials have sought to control or influence the press, most recently by ""embedding"" reporters within military units in Iraq. This second front, where press freedom and military imperatives often do battle, is the territory explored in ""The Military and the Press"", a history of how press-military relations have evolved during the twentieth and twenty-first century in response to the demands of politics, economics, technology, and legal and social forces. Author Michael S. Sweeney takes a chronological approach,…
On the morning of September 11, 2001, I woke up expecting to spend that day – and the rest of my academic career – leisurely studying the interplay of culture and individual temperament in second language acquisition. As the rest of that terrible day unfolded, however, my research up to that point suddenly seemed very small and almost decadently privileged. Recruiting the rudimentary cultural anthropology toolbox I had already amassed, I took a deep breath and plunged into the rabbit hole of studying the role of culture in human conflict. Twenty-two years later, using my Japan base and relevant language skills, my research has focused on the Japanese experience in World War II.
Go to any park or public square in any city in the world and you are likely to see statues of people so venerated because they fought/died in some war. Why do we mythologize war, our species’ most destructive collective behavior?
In this 2002 book, written in the second years of the Global War on Terror, American journalist Chris Hedges gives a chilling explanation that, for me, dovetailed perfectly with my readings of Becker and TMT: “Most of us willingly accept war as long as we can fold it into a belief system that paints the ensuing suffering as necessary for a higher good, for human beings seek not only happiness but also meaning. And tragically war is sometimes the most powerful way in society to achieve meaning.”
As a veteran war correspondent, Chris Hedges has survived ambushes in Central America, imprisonment in Sudan, and a beating by Saudi military police. He has seen children murdered for sport in Gaza and petty thugs elevated into war heroes in the Balkans. Hedges, who is also a former divinity student, has seen war at its worst and knows too well that to those who pass through it, war can be exhilarating and even addictive: It gives us purpose, meaning, a reason for living."Drawing on his own experience and on the literature of combat from Homer to Michael Herr, Hedges shows…
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…
From an early age, I have made a life out of listening to, telling, teaching, and writing about war stories. I am intrigued by their widespread personal and public importance. My changing associations with these stories and their tellers have paralleled evolving stages in my life—son, soldier, father, and college professor. Each stage has spawned different questions and insights about the tales and their narrators. At various moments in my own life, these war stories have also given rise to fantasized adventure, catharsis, emotional highs and lows, insights about human nature tested within the crucible of war, and intriguing relationships with the storytellers—their lives and minds.
As a Vietnam veteran, teacher of war literature, and writer, I am disappointed that I never interviewed Michael Herr. I can only imagine what such an encounter might have been like with this larger-than-life figure, at least the persona (adrenaline junky, reporter on drugs) found in this fragmented collection of war reportage. With its New Journalistic style and content, the sensory-overload writing might be best described as a collection of literary illumination rounds (their underlying message—war is hell and addictive). As a freelance journalist, Herr arrived in Vietnam wanting to reveal the large ugly truths about the war, which he succeeds in doing, but I find the soldiers’ personal war stories more gripping and truthful. For me and even Herr, the real surprise is that this book ultimately chronicles the author’s own war story of innocence lost: the anti-war reporter becomes just as addicted to war as some of his…
A groundbreaking piece of journalism which inspired Stanley Kubrick's classic Vietnam War film Full Metal Jacket.
We took space back quickly, expensively, with total panic and close to maximum brutality. Our machine was devastating. And versatile. It could do everything but stop.
Michael Herr went to Vietnam as a war correspondent for Esquire. He returned to tell the real story in all its hallucinatory madness and brutality, cutting to the quick of the conflict and its seductive, devastating impact on a generation of young men. His unflinching account is haunting in its violence, but…
I grew up during the war years and remembered the backouts, ration cards, and the newscasts from the front and worrying about my cousins who were in the middle of it. My cousin Gerald always made sure I had a model airplane kit every Christmas, even though he was fighting in Europe. As a journalist, I was lucky to work with a few war correspondents that covered Dieppe and D-Day and heard what they went through. One of those people was Bill Anderson who died two years ago. I recorded a video interview of him when he was still 97 about his experiences in Canada and Europe
Shapiro, a Canadian war correspondent, landed with the troops on the beaches on D-Day and his other experiences rise to the surface in his novel about life during the blitz and the events leading up to D-Day. Shapiro always considered his a historical novel. His descriptions are those of someone who lived the tale. The hero is a U.S. soldier who found himself deeply in love with an English woman. This book came out a few years after the war when the war was fresh in our minds. It was like reliving those wonderful days all over again.
The Sixth of June tells the story of American soldier Brad Parker, who joins the U.S. Army to fight in World War II. When he arrives in London, he meets lonely Valerie Russell, and they fall in love despite their loyalties to wife and future husband. Although they are certain that their love could overcome every obstacle, everything changes after the Normandy Invasion.
With the discerning eye of an experienced war correspondent, Ryan draws a picture of this massive WWII undertaking that turned into a tragic Allied disaster despite the courage and heroism required by the many thousands of men in the field.
The pathos and futility, so masterly portrayed, stay with you long after you have closed the book and returned it to your bookshelf.
The unforgivable waste of war brought to mind my father’s stories of his WWII desert campaign as the doctor of a Gurkha Battalion in the British Indian Army, making this story a very personal one for me.
I came across this via a couple of keywords I typed into Google Books as part of my research for an abortive World War II-related nonfiction book. Up popped a reference to Studio Europe, which turned out to be a wonderful 1945 memoir by an American artist who travelled to Europe to draw the conflict.
His quickfire sketches complement his intensely atmospheric, witty, and compassionate account of his experiences. I can’t understand why this fantastic book never seems to be referenced in books about the war.
Graham Greene is one of my favorite authors. His other books have stayed with me since I read them countless moons ago. Their observations and lessons feel urgently relevant today.
This past summer, I looked for an audiobook to distract me during my travels across the country. When I realized I’d never read Greene’s classic The Quiet American, I downloaded it to my iPhone, plugged into my Airpods, and clicked play.
Narrator Joseph Porter transported me to 1955 Vietnam. Through his journalist protagonist (alter ego?), Greene warned the United States to stay out of the Southeastern Asian conflict. He also twisted and deepened the whodunit murder mystery.
These lessons will stick with me for decades to come.
Graham Greene's classic exploration of love, innocence, and morality in Vietnam
"I never knew a man who had better motives for all the trouble he caused," Graham Greene's narrator Fowler remarks of Alden Pyle, the eponymous "Quiet American" of what is perhaps the most controversial novel of his career. Pyle is the brash young idealist sent out by Washington on a mysterious mission to Saigon, where the French Army struggles against the Vietminh guerrillas.
As young Pyle's well-intentioned policies blunder into bloodshed, Fowler, a seasoned and cynical British reporter, finds it impossible to stand safely aside as an observer. But…
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.
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.
Veteran Sunday Times war correspondent, Marie Colvin was killed in February 2012 when covering the uprising in Syria.
On the Front Line is an Orwell Special Prize winning journalism collection from veteran war correspondent Marie Colvin, who is the subject of the movie A Private War, starring Rosamund Pike and Jamie Dornan.
Marie Colvin held a profound belief in the pursuit of truth, and the courage and humanity of her work was deeply admired. On the Front Line includes her various interviews with Yasser Arafat and Colonel Gadaffi; reports from East Timor in 1999 where she shamed the UN into…
Despatches is narrated by a war correspondent covering the Gallipoli campaign of WWI and effortlessly fuses classic literature and Lovecraftian horror.
I loved the epistle format and the periodic language, and I found it hard not to consider the book in the same vein as the classic works of HG Wells or Jules Verne. Like all books in the genre I have enjoyed, Despatches questions war and the nature of those who wage it, and if, even in humankind’s darkest moments, there is always some sense of hope amongst the carnage.
Or perhaps the irony that, as humanity fights with itself, it fast becomes blind to more pressing, potent enemies waiting for the opportunity to usurp all. There is genuine excitement to the final act and the story’s conclusion is poignant and heartfelt, making for an exhilarating and satisfying read.
Daily Star war correspondent Cassius Smythe is off to the Dardanelles to report on the Allied campaign. That is, if only the War Office will let him tell the truth. But after months in the trenches at Anzac Cove, Smythe learns that it isn’t just the Ottoman who wish to claim back the land, and the truth is as slippery as a serpent . . .
