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Looking for Trouble [Hardcover]

Leslie Cockburn (Author)
3.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (9 customer reviews)


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Book Description

February 17, 1998
News correspondent Leslie Cockburn has dined with the Cali Cartel, marched with the Khmer Rouge, hunted down the Black Turban in Afghanistan, pursued the Russian mafia to the Arctic Circle, shared pomegranate sauce with the Ayatollahs, and stopped a small Kurdish war, but she has never told these stories in a book-until now.

Cockburn was one of the first women to break into the tight fraternity of combat and third-world reportage when she began work at the London bureau of NBC News in 1976-where successful news gathering required "unorthodox tactics, stamina, and, for best results, a criminal mind." By the time she moved to CBS's "60 Minutes," Cockburn had interviewed Muammar Qaddaffi and Margaret Thatcher, been arrested as spy in Gambia, and effectively eliminated whatever doubts her colleagues might have had about a woman's ability to tackle the news business's most dangerous assignments.

A mother of three who has made a career of breaking down barriers, Leslie Cockburn has exposed the tobacco lobby in Washington and human rights violations in Cambodia, and her impact on foreign and domestic policy has been as powerful as her impact on the rights and prerogatives of working women. In an industry in which, as late as 1973, women had to lobby to wear trousers to work, Leslie Cockburn was determined to combine a strong family life with a strong professional life, sacrificing neither.

With a cast of generals, drug lords, rock stars, and kings, LOOKING FOR TROUBLE is the incredible story of a career that has spanned the history-making news events of the last two decades.

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Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

From the war-torn jungles of Nicaragua to the inner circle of Russia's black market, Leslie Cockburn (One Point Safe) recounts in vivid detail her experiences of being one of the first women to break into the old boy's club of Third World reporting in Looking for Trouble. While living on a houseboat on the Thames River in London and studying the finer points of Gambian oral poetry, Cockburn was convinced by a friend who had recently befriended a NBC filming crew in Morocco to pursue a career in journalism. Lured by the excitement and glamour of television reporting, Cockburn left academia and landed a job as an NBC News correspondent. Within a short time, she found herself face-to-face with Momar Quadaffi (an interview she almost missed because she overslept) and hobnobbing with the world's key political players. Cockburn's account, from the dredges of Haiti and Papa Doc's gruesome regime to the Sunni-Muslim coup in Afghanistan that barred women from working and seeing male doctors, is a bizarre behind-the-scenes look at Third World reporting. For example, when Cockburn and her husband Andrew befriended Colombian drug czar Pablo Escobar, the most powerful crime lord in South America, he used to sign his letters to them with his thumbprint. Or how about the time she braved the wholesale destruction of Somalia when she was six months pregnant? Her documentaries have gotten her blackballed from the Pentagon, the State Department, and a couple of White House reigns, but they have also changed public opinion, moved policy makers, and helped correct injustices around the world.

From Booklist

News junkies and folks who have never quite understood what a "news producer" does are the likeliest candidates to read this lively retrospective of Cockburn's 20 years in that position, producing documentaries and news reports for CBS, ABC, and PBS' Frontline. On the journalistic front, Cockburn, currently a Vanity Fair contributing editor, has won many awards (though a recent foray into "infotainment"--coauthoring with journalist husband Andrew One Point Safe, which became DreamWorks' less than successful first film, The Peacemaker--may have been a misstep). Now Cockburn is back on the world news beat, with behind-the-scenes stories from Afghanistan, Somalia, Cambodia, Iran, and Nicaragua, not to mention Washington, where she investigated the tobacco lobby long before most newspeople knew there was one. "People become journalists," Cockburn avers, "because they cannot decide what to be when they grow up." In Looking for Trouble, she vividly captures the mixture of knowledge, contacts, and bravado required to bring U.S. audiences stories from countries where secrecy and cover-up are a way of life. Mary Carroll

Product Details

  • Hardcover: 288 pages
  • Publisher: Doubleday; 1st Anchor Books ed edition (February 17, 1998)
  • Language: English
  • ISBN-10: 0385483198
  • ISBN-13: 978-0385483193
  • Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6 x 1.1 inches
  • Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds
  • Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (9 customer reviews)
  • Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,299,492 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

9 Reviews
5 star:
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4 star:
 (1)
3 star:
 (5)
2 star:    (0)
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Average Customer Review
3.8 out of 5 stars (9 customer reviews)
 
 
 
 
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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars Don't leave for Baghdad without it..., September 13, 2000
Well-written, fast-paced account of a smart, savvy female journalist's rise to power in the male-dominated media area of combat coverage & "sensitive" foreign issues. It offers inside stories on a number of the world's political hot spots (and some of the US's nastiest foreign policy decisions). The book is structured engagingly too. The first chapter covers one of the author's more recent assignments -- and a journalistic pinnacle, as the Taliban story Leslie produces is co-anchored by Barbara Walters and Diane Sawyer; the latter, not Walters, went with her to Afghanistan. The subsequent chapters chronicle her some of her career's hairiest moments from its start two decades ago. Leslie's vivid descriptions of what she sees, as well as the acerbic comments she drily inserts, make her seem personally likable and as though she'd be an extremely entertaining dinner guest (though possessed of an excellent political BS detector). More on her family would have been nice, but this book is focused primarily on her work and how she does it; snapshots rather than the full-length autobiography with full-fleshed auxiliary characters. Still, riveting and hard to put down.
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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars Indiana Jones' Well-Bred Sister, July 6, 2001
By 
Tracy K. Woodard (Atlanta, GA United States) - See all my reviews
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The narrator is one of the strongest female characters I've read in a long time---intelligent, well-read, daring, tactful, witty, and with good taste in everything. Her adventures through the most dangerous political areas put a new spin on what you hear in the newspaper, from rather ridiculous dictator families to the horrible living conditions of villages in countries that have declared martial law. It's a fast read.
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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars A politically astute yet strangely passionless book., June 3, 1999
This review is from: Looking for Trouble (Hardcover)
I finished "Looking for Trouble" feeling unsatisfied -- I was impressed by Leslie's courage and stamina, but left untouched by her or any of the people she meets on her travels. There is a strange lack of human feeling in the book, an offshoot of her journalist background perhaps? As a result, her husband (who appears frequently in the text) is completely faceless, as are many of the famous third world figures she meets (with the exception of Saddam Hussein's son, who is well drawn). Despite this, the book is well worth reading for the insight she offers on US policy and UN intervention in Third World countries, and how this intervention causes as much trouble as good -- but it will leave you thirsty for more.
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