Where War Lives: A Journey into the Heart of War [Hardcover]

Paul Watson (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 16, 2008 | ISBN-10: 159486957X | ISBN-13: 978-1594869570 | Edition: First Edition

      Paul Watson was born with his right hand missing. To defy people's expectations, he becomes an avid war journalist, traveling to the most dangerous places on earth and staying long after it was wise or safe to do so. Then, with the click of a camera shutter, Watson's life changes forever.

     As one of the last remaining journalists in Somalia, hehears that a Blackhawk has been shot down over Mogadishu,and that a mob is dragging the body of a U.S. soldier through the streets. Watson risks his life to infiltrate the mob and snap the photo that garners him the Pulitzer Prize. But as the accolades pour in and Watson travels to other troubled areas of the world, he can think only of the damage he has done—to Sergeant Cleveland’s family, whose last image of their son would always be the battered, dusty corpse Watson had photographed; and, he fears, to the spread of terrorism, with the worldwide spectacle his photo created from that barbarity.

     From the jungles of Rwanda to the ruined streets of Somalia to the craggy mountains of Afghanistan, this intimate portrayal of war from the front lines is raw and deeply human, a tale for our time.

 

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Veteran war correspondent Watson takes the reader on a graphic tour of modern battlefields from Eritrea to Afghanistan, with a particularly haunting stop in war-torn Somalia. It was in Somalia that Watson photographed the corpse of an American soldier being dragged through the streets of Mogadishu—a photo that set off a firestorm of outrage in the U.S. and won him a Pulitzer Prize. Watson claims that he was consumed by anger, fear, and shame after taking the picture and later sought exoneration from the soldier's family. A self-described war junkie who calls Kashmir a fiery seductress, Watson is undeterred even when he's diagnosed with chronic depression and post-traumatic stress disorder. The lessons that he learns—[w]ar does not conquer evil, truth is a moving target and war lives in all of us, among them—are neither original nor particularly helpful. Watson is at his best describing the sights and sounds of war; his book suffers and he loses credibility when he poses as a journalist-savant whose only loyalty is to the truth. (Sept.)
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From Booklist

*Starred Review* In 1993, Paul Watson, a journalist stationed in Mogadishu, Somalia, took a photograph that was published around the world and won him a Pulitzer Prize. It was an image of a dead American soldier being dragged through the streets, his corpse being beaten by onlookers. It’s a sad, tragic picture, emblematic of the sort of thing that Watson, as a war correspondent, did for a living: he wrote about and took pictures of the kind of violence and tragedy that most of us can barely imagine. But being a journalist of war takes its toll on a person (the author was later diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder), and this intense, memorable memoir show its readers what it feels like to work in the middle of a war zone. War correspondents have been portrayed in fiction as glamorous and heroic. The truth, or at least the truth of Watson’s experience, is somewhat different. It’s a life of constant fear, of being prepared to move at a moment’s notice, of capturing in words and pictures the worst that human beings are capable of. Not too many autobiographies deserve to be called a must-read, but this is one of them, if for no other reason than to put the horrors seen on the nightly news into a larger, more personal context. --David Pitt

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 368 pages
• Publisher: Rodale Books; First Edition edition (September 16, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 159486957X
• ISBN-13: 978-1594869570
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6 x 1.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #587,244 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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