A close-up autobiography of a photojournalist who has acted as a war correspondent around the world tells of how his youthful excitement in covering battle faded as his pictures became more and more powerful.
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Book Description
Editorial Reviews
From Publishers Weekly
Legendary British photojournalist McCullin ( Hearts of Darkness ; Beirut: A City in Crisis ) has captured the essence of war on film in the Congo, Biafra, Vietnam, Cambodia and Afghanistan. His engrossing autobiography includes 94 examples of his powerful images. Typical of his compassionate yet unsparing work are photographs of a Biafran officer lecturing one of his dead soldiers and of an inmate in a Beirut insane asylum carrying a handicapped child to safety. Aided by freelance writer Chester, McCullin recreates his childhood in London's mean streets and tells us how he got his first assignment. The majority of the book, however, evokes the sad, grim and ghastly moments he brought into focus through his viewfinder and the heavy personal price he paid for those pictures: malaria, broken bones, shrapnel wounds, death threats and a traumatic stint in Idi Ami's most sinister prison. Neither sentimentality, self-pity nor self-congratulation soften the harrowing story of McCullin's quest for the perfect war picture.
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Kirkus Reviews
Unsparing reminiscences that effectively combine the bittersweet life of a world-class photojournalist with a generous selection of his haunting lifework. A product of one of north London's tougher slums, McCullin came of age during the WW II blitz. Having returned to the old neighborhood and an animation-lab job following a hitch in the RAF (where he acquired an interest in photography), the author sold some shots of local gang members to The Observer. Further assignments resulted, and McCullin was off on a globe-trotting career that over three decades would take him to 120 foreign countries and more than two dozen wars--in Biafra, Cambodia, the Congo, Cyprus, El Salvador, Iran, Israel, Lebanon, Northern Ireland, Uganda, Vietnam, etc. During the years that he made a name for himself bringing home to newspaper readers the horrific realities of battle for noncombatants as well as front-line troops, the author narrowly escaped death on countless occasions. At once drawn to and repelled by the bloody violence whose heart of darkness he so graphically captured on film, McCullin marches to the beat of a different drummer these days. Leaving little doubt that his focus on the force of arms was as much a matter of circumstance as choice, he notes that somewhere along the line the UK press began covering lifestyles in preference to life. With his brand of stark images in disfavor, the author and his employer of 18 years (London's Sunday Times) parted company during the early 1980's. Meanwhile, McCullin lost his wife to brain cancer, further diminishing his tolerance for death and destruction. Today, the author rattles about a Somerset farmstead, trying to come to terms with a volatile past, restless present, and uncertain future. A genuinely affecting memoir that reckons, without self-pity, the cost and loss involved in making one's way on the cutting edge of conflict. (Ninety-four powerful photographs.) -- Copyright ©1991, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Demons and Dirt,
By MR HAYDON A DEWES (Wellington, New Zealand) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Unreasonable Behaviour: An Autobiography (Hardcover)
This book is more than just a description of one man's life. As one wades through chapter after chapter of Don McCullin's thoughts and reflections, it's plain to see that he is a fighter. From a harsh upbringing in wartime London, to his constant struggle to bring images of conflict and misery into the public eye and his resultant battle against the ghosts of his death-stained past, a theme of conflict courses through the pages of this book like hot blood from a unstaunched bullet wound. Unlike John Simpson's hedonistic autobiography of his life hopping between the earth's hotspots, "Strange Places, Questionable People", McCullin dashes past the glorifying clichés of foreign correspondence and portrays the harsh reality of a life under constant pressure, whether it be the initial social stigma of being of an inferior class within the media sector, the fear experienced as incoming artillery comes whistling towards him, or being locked up in a foreign prison, where death lurks around every corner. This is McCullin's way of exorcising the demons of a life filled with frightful images that most of us merely glance at from time to time, and acknowledges this in the final chapter. Although McCullin does not delve as deep into the psyche as Anthony Loyd's memoir "My War Gone By, I Miss It So", this book rates as being one of the most sincere accounts of life on the front-line as I have experienced.
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
His Life That Illustrates Death,
By
This review is from: Unreasonable Behaviour: An Autobiography (Hardcover)
I came back to Don McCullin after accidentally coming across a collection of his photos many years ago. A photgraph he took of a starving albino Biafran boy had seared its self into my memory, though at the time I was too wrapped up in my college reading requirements to fully explore his work and autobiography. So five years later, while I couldn't remember McCullin's name, the power of that one picture egged me on until I finally, after digging through the university library's photo section for a few hours, found his books again.The autobiography is amazing because of the incredible story and insanity of McCullin's career. It is all the more extraordinary because of the direct potency of the writing coming from a man who has suffered from dyslexia and generally avoided books. With this work McCullin shows the humanity of war and the morbid destruction thrust upon a people; the surreal insanity that must infect those living with and creating death. With yet another large scale war impending this book is an illustration of the basic humanity that too often gets lost in politics.
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