War Stories: Reporting in the Time of Conflict From the Crimea to Iraq [Hardcover]

Harold Evans (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 25, 2003

'War Stories:Reporting in the Time of Conflict from the Crimea to Iraq' tells war correspondent's stories, from the very first reports from the Crimean War in 1853 to the Second Gulf War in 2003. Through the notebooks, photographs, headlines, wires, telegrams, and satellite uplinks, Harold Evans describes the times in which these uniquely dedicated men and women worked, and the means through which-sometimes at the cost of their own lives- they retold the most immediate stories of war.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Evans's compact overview of wartime reporting stems from an exhibit (for which he was a guest curator) at Washington, D.C.'s Newseum. With images ranging from the distressing to the heartrending, the author-a former journalist himself (and a former Random House senior executive)-presents a powerful study of the wild circumstances journalists have put themselves in in order to get the story. Evans (The American Century) divides the book into sections named after those in the exhibit: e.g., there's a chapter on "Romance vs. Reality," with profiles of journalists who act with "adventure and derring-do," such as Greg Marinovich, who covered the war in Croatia in 1991 ("I find I liked war. There was a peculiar liberating excitement in taking cover from an artillery barrage in a woodshed that offered no protection at all") and another on "Secrecy vs. The Story," where Evans quotes President Kennedy, after the Bay of Pigs fiasco: "Every newspaper now asks itself with respect to every story: `Is it news?' All I suggest is that you add the question `Is it in the interest of national security?' " The volume's photographs add depth and meaning to the text; among the most striking are those of the blood-covered camera of an injured photographer on the floor of Baghdad's Palestine Hotel in April 2003 and the notorious sequence of Eddie Adams's photos of the execution of a Vietcong prisoner in Saigon in 1968. Spanning news organizations from Al-Jazeera to the Washington Post and journalists from Christiane Amanpour to Tom Wolfe (who covered Vietnam), this is an impressive, forceful tribute. FYI: This is the first volume in a series of Newseum-produced books.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Review

"..from Al-Jazeera to the Washington Post, and journalists Amanpour to Tom Wolfe, this is an impressive, forceful tribute. -- Publishers Weekly, Aug 18,2003

'War Stories'is breezy, pocket-sized and illustrated, a survey of war reporting from Roman times to the present" --H.D.S. Greenway,The New York Times, Nov.23,2003

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 96 pages
• Publisher: Bunker Hill Publishing (October 25, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1593730055
• ISBN-13: 978-1593730055
• Product Dimensions: 6.4 x 6.3 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 9.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,070,751 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Harold Evans is the author of two critically acclaimed landmark histories of America: the New York Times bestseller "The American Century" and "They Made America: Two Centuries of Innovators," selected by Fortune magazine on its own 75th anniversary as one of the best books of the previous 75 years. WGBH television made four documentaries based on Evans's work.
Evans first came to America in 1956 as a Harkness Fellow at the University of Chicago and Stanford University; he traveled through 40 states and reported for The Manchester Guardian his first-hand experiences of the civil rights battles in the Deep South. On his return, he became assistant editor of the sister paper, the Manchester Evening News, then editor of the leading provincial daily, The Northern Echo, where he succeeded in getting a resistant government to establish a life-saving program for the detection of cervical cancer, and won a royal pardon for a man wrongly executed for murder.
Appointed editor of the influential London Sunday Times in 1967 and then of The Times in 1981, Evans was voted by British journalists the greatest all-time editor and also awarded the European gold award for the investigations and campaigns he led: his Insight team exposed the spy Kim Philby, tracked the cause of the crash of a DC-10 airliner near Paris (then the world's most deadly crash), and won justice for the children affected by thalidomide.
Settling in America in 1982, after a famous battle with Rupert Murdoch, he was editorial director of US News & World Report, founding editor of Condé Nast Traveler, and president of Random House from 1990 to 1997. He remains a contributing editor of US News, is editor at large at The Week magazine, and is a frequent broadcaster on American affairs for the BBC.
In 2004 he was knighted for his service to journalism. He is now an American citizen who lives in New York with his wife, Tina Brown, and their son and daughter.