2012 non-fiction, following the life and death of Marie Colvin.
This is another Book of the Week condensation; the thing that's
most noticeably broken up is the story of Colvin's personal
relationships, since one moment she's marrying Patrick Bishop and the
next he's her ex-husband. If you know anything about Colvin's life
already you'll spot more gaps (her journalistic career appears to
start with The Sunday Times in 1985, whereas by then she'd already
been the Paris bureau manager for United Press), but overall the
condensation is reasonably well-handled.
What's left is clearly a sympathetic biography, which tries to steer
the reader away from Colvin's problems or at least to paint them in
the best possible light. She comes over as clearly the sort of person
who had to be the leader of any social group, and people who didn't go
along with that were pushed away. And when there was another witness
to the events, their story often differs, as with her reception by
fellow journalists after her trip (disguised as a local woman) to
Basra during the Iran-Iraq war: Colvin says they were all laudatory,
but the other female journalist who was with her says that the men
blamed the pair for making their job harder.
But this is mostly about her journalistic career, as it probably
should be, and since most such careers are a series of incidents,
individual moments can be excised without damaging the overall
impression. Particularly effective is a description of a trip across
the mountains from Chechnya into Georgia, after Colvin's line of
retreat by road had been cut off by Russian forces.
I find myself at least potentially interested in reading the full
book.
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