Customer Reviews

Point of Departure (Classics of Reportage S.)

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I can't forget 1967; it was one of the great years. I'm rereading a powerful and valuable book written in 1967, so I did a dogpile search for "James Cameron + Point of Departure" and got a website with a Studs Terkel interview in which he said this:

"Have I mentioned the name of James Cameron? Some people ask me who is the writer I most admire. I can tell you the journalist I most admire. He was an Englishman named James Cameron. Not the James Cameron who directed "Titanic" - a wholly different animal."

Wow, the great Studs Terkel likes the author I'm reading and enjoying! Terkel goes on to say:

"I suggest you find a book called Point Of Departure by James Cameron. It's available somewhere in paperback. It's one of the best pieces of writing that you've ever read anywhere. It's sort of memoiristic, through essays from different places he's been in the world. I met him when he first returned from North Vietnam. He was the first Western journalist to visit and speak with Ho Chi Minh during the bombings there - the very first. Of course Ho Chi Minh knew him, they all knew Cameron. His stories are wonderful. They're funny and they're brilliant, and incisive."

Yep, the very book I'm reading. And if you have even the slightest interest in adventure or the life of a foreign correspondent, if you are fascinated by war, if you hate war, or if you believe that everyone is entitled to the pursuit of happiness, I would tell you to read this book that I was lucky to find in the Soi 6 Library in Pattaya, Thailand.