Customer Reviews

Looking for Trouble

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(5)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

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.

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.

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.

This could have been a very important book. Cockburn's personal courage and her commitment to exposing the truth landed her in many political hotbeds worldwide. She was never afraid to go the additional step or to ask the right question, and her reports helped change history by revealing the seamier side of U.S. foreign policy in the 1980s and 1990s.

However, Cockburn's chapters are formulaic: she gets an assignment, lands in the country, braves various insults and injuries, meets the famous revolutionary or dictator, and completes her prize-winning documentary. Her writing is curiously bloodless. Often the book reads more like a travelogue than like a journalistic memoir. Cockburn has had a path-breaking career (about which I had known relatively little) but this book does not leave the reader wanting to know more about her.

I have not been so enthralled with a journalist's memoirs since the first half of Theodore H. White's "In Search of History." This book was fascinating from cover to cover. When I told my wife about it she would open up the book at random and read for several pages, totally engrossed. She almost read the entire book through this sporadic grazing.

My enthusiasm for "Out of Control" is so complete that I am biased to the point of not being able to find anything wrong with it. I think readers who opine that there is not enough detail are missing the point. This is a personal snapshot of one person's 20-year professional life, not a treatise on the dozen-odd events that she has covered, each of which would require a couple of books to adequately detail. I also think the reader who complains about name dropping also misses the point. This does injustice to Ms. Cockburn's immense talent for using wit, a biting writing style, and a well-earned license for subjectivity to tell a fascinating story.

What makes this book great are the stories and characters Cockburn meets up with, not Cockburn herself or her writing. There's no doubt that she's covered a broad array of international incidents. But while the stories themselves are interesting, Cockburn sweeps through them too quickly, leaving you asking, "What just happened?" She also does some name-dropping, which grates on the nerves because most of them aren't relevant to her stories. At one point in the book she manages to point out that she had Mick Jagger at her dinner table before going on an assignment. A good read for some recent international history. But don't expect too much.

The book was good in the beginning. After a while it got too detailed and unexiting.

Ms Cockburn's recollections of her adventures gives new meaning to the concept of gutsy journalists. She recounts actual events with skill and sensitivity, making even the most hair-raising segements credible and enjoyable. This chronicle has immense appeal for the arm- chair traveler and seasoned veteran of foreign travels alike. The smells, sounds, sights and textures come alive in anecdotes gleaned from her wide-ranging and fearless pursuit of "news" that touches the very elemental core of human experience. What in other, less-skilled writers might be considered "name-dropping," in Cock- burns matter-of-fact style becomes endearing. Chalk one up for an intelligent, fearless profes- sional who is not afraid to deal with hardships and trials of a nomadic existence, while still main- taining ties to family, friends, and colleagues. Read this one and hope for more like it.

The book opens with Cockburn(the author)and Barbara Walters in Afghanistan to interview Talliban leaders. Cockburn proceeds with a lively account of her career as a TV journalist and producer who specializes in exposing unknown aspects of the most dangerous places on earth. She describes how she interviewed members of the Columbian cocaine cartels, Col. Khadafi, and members of Saddam Hussein's family, and covered covert and overt wars from the Sudan to Cambodia to the 1990 Gulf War, all the while contending with risks of tropical diseases (esp. cerebral malaria), land mines and itchy fingers on automatic weapons. She's had some incredible adventures in places most people would never voluntarily travel to and exposed some seamy sides of U.S. foreign policy. Her comments about the choice of what is aired on the nightly news were interesting. My only regret: she didn't interview Osam bin Laden on that trip to Afghanistan!