- Save $10 when you spend $50 and pay with Bill Me Later. The fast and convenient way to buy without using your credit card. Offer limited to items purchased from Amazon.com between July 14, 2008 and July 21, 2008. One per customer account. Enter code BMLSAVES at checkout. Here's how (restrictions apply)
Join Amazon Prime and ship Two-Day for free and Overnight for $3.99. Already a member? Sign in.
Tell Them I Didn't Cry
and over 140,000 other books are available for Amazon Kindle – Amazon’s new wireless reading device. Learn more
|
||||||||||||
Special Offers and Product Promotions
Better Together
Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought
We Interrupt This Newscast: How to Improve Local News and Win Ratings, Too by Tom Rosenstiel
$22.99
|
The Elements of Journalism: What Newspeople Should Know and The Public Should Expect by Bill Kovach  (12)
|
The Elements of Journalism: What Newspeople Should Know and the Public Should Expect, Completely Updated and Revised by Bill Kovach  (1)
$11.16
|
We the Media: Grassroots Journalism By the People, For the People by Dan Gillmor (30)
$11.55
|
Mightier than the Sword: How the Media Have Shaped American History, Second Edition by Rodger Streitmatter  (3)
$34.20
|
Editorial Reviews
From Publishers Weekly
Jackie Spinner, a Washington Post staff writer, left the steady analytics of financial reporting for the terror-laden beat of Iraq in May 2004. In this memoir, she writes in simple yet descriptive language about the daily challenges and rewards of life in a war zone. Over the course of nine months, she carves her niche at the Baghdad bureau as den mother and human-interest reporter. She objectively reports on the struggles and aspirations of everyday Iraqis, the triumphs and failures of the military and the violence that traps her indoors most of the time—but the heart of this book is in her personal investment in the bureau's Iraqi staff. Spinner cooks weekly dinners for them, plays soccer in the hallways with them and teaches them English. Each chapter ends with reflections written by Jenny, her twin back home, an English professor, who belies her fears with chipper encouragement and dreads toy deliveries to her son because Jackie always orders them online after near-death experiences. Affable and earnest, Spinner made herself at home in war, creating a "family" despite cultural and language barriers, and hers is a unique perspective on living and reporting in Iraq. (Feb.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
From The Washington Post's Book World/washingtonpost.com
After I returned home from a recent reporting stint in Baghdad, a friend invited his 10-year-old son to ask me anything he wanted about Iraq. Immediately, the boy replied, "Why would you risk your life for a story?" Sometimes it takes a child to ask the sensible questions that adults won't. In her poignant Tell Them I Didn't Cry, Jackie Spinner, a Washington Post reporter first sent to Iraq in 2004, helps explain why we journalists get lured to the front -- and then have trouble going home. Spinner's fresh eyes, unlike those of more war-weathered correspondents, provide an honest look at what it means to cover a country that often appears to be coming apart at the seams. Without pretending to be a Middle East expert, Spinner focuses on her relationships with the Post's Iraqi staff, who become her family in Baghdad, and gauges how living under the constant threat of bombings and kidnappings is straining her ties with her real family back home. It is a tale she weaves well, bolstered by the moral, spiritual and literary support she gets from her twin sister, Jenny, an English professor at St. Joseph's University. Together they chart the strange inverse relationship that so often develops when covering a page-one war: As Spinner's career skyrockets, her health deteriorates. Even though she recognizes the toll it is taking, Spinner becomes unable to pull herself away: She's got Iraq and its people under her skin. This is the same kind of unbridled dedication to the story that kept my colleague Jill Carroll, the Christian Science Monitor freelance reporter kidnapped in Baghdad last month, working in Iraq nearly year-round since 2003. Spinner's willingness to lay bare her posting's side effects, from the droll to the devastating, sets her book apart. She also helps explain a breed that is no longer the rare bird it was in, say, Vietnam: the female war correspondent. Spinner captures our simultaneous urge to prove how unflappable we are -- she took the title Tell Them I Didn't Cry from her own shell-shocked but defiant words after escaping a terrifying kidnapping attempt -- and balances it against her unmistakably feminine impulses. She bakes cookies to win over suspicious policemen, forges intense friendships with her translators and just happens to be the person in the bureau who whips up fabulous Friday night dinners. None of which, of course, answers the 10-year-old's question. Why put ourselves in harm's way, only to have readers complain (as many of Spinner's did) that press coverage of Iraq is negative and unpatriotic? "I didn't become a journalist to serve my country," Spinner explains. "I became a journalist to serve the story." That means documenting the anguish of a country for which Americans now bear enormous responsibility. It means telling the truth and hoping that our Iraqi colleagues, many of them as fearful of insurgents today as they were of Saddam Hussein, will do the same. It means showing readers that the lives of Iraqis are just as important as ours. Spinner reminds us of all of these essentials, and then some. "If you're there, risking your life," she writes, "you want someone, anyone, to understand why you are there." Her fine book widens the circle of people who will. Ilene R. Prusher, Jerusalem bureau chief of the Christian Science Monitor, began covering Iraq during the U.S.-led invasion in 2003. Reviewed by Ilene R. Prusher
Copyright 2006, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.
See all Editorial Reviews
Jackie Spinner, a Washington Post staff writer, left the steady analytics of financial reporting for the terror-laden beat of Iraq in May 2004. In this memoir, she writes in simple yet descriptive language about the daily challenges and rewards of life in a war zone. Over the course of nine months, she carves her niche at the Baghdad bureau as den mother and human-interest reporter. She objectively reports on the struggles and aspirations of everyday Iraqis, the triumphs and failures of the military and the violence that traps her indoors most of the time—but the heart of this book is in her personal investment in the bureau's Iraqi staff. Spinner cooks weekly dinners for them, plays soccer in the hallways with them and teaches them English. Each chapter ends with reflections written by Jenny, her twin back home, an English professor, who belies her fears with chipper encouragement and dreads toy deliveries to her son because Jackie always orders them online after near-death experiences. Affable and earnest, Spinner made herself at home in war, creating a "family" despite cultural and language barriers, and hers is a unique perspective on living and reporting in Iraq. (Feb.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
From The Washington Post's Book World/washingtonpost.com
After I returned home from a recent reporting stint in Baghdad, a friend invited his 10-year-old son to ask me anything he wanted about Iraq. Immediately, the boy replied, "Why would you risk your life for a story?" Sometimes it takes a child to ask the sensible questions that adults won't. In her poignant Tell Them I Didn't Cry, Jackie Spinner, a Washington Post reporter first sent to Iraq in 2004, helps explain why we journalists get lured to the front -- and then have trouble going home. Spinner's fresh eyes, unlike those of more war-weathered correspondents, provide an honest look at what it means to cover a country that often appears to be coming apart at the seams. Without pretending to be a Middle East expert, Spinner focuses on her relationships with the Post's Iraqi staff, who become her family in Baghdad, and gauges how living under the constant threat of bombings and kidnappings is straining her ties with her real family back home. It is a tale she weaves well, bolstered by the moral, spiritual and literary support she gets from her twin sister, Jenny, an English professor at St. Joseph's University. Together they chart the strange inverse relationship that so often develops when covering a page-one war: As Spinner's career skyrockets, her health deteriorates. Even though she recognizes the toll it is taking, Spinner becomes unable to pull herself away: She's got Iraq and its people under her skin. This is the same kind of unbridled dedication to the story that kept my colleague Jill Carroll, the Christian Science Monitor freelance reporter kidnapped in Baghdad last month, working in Iraq nearly year-round since 2003. Spinner's willingness to lay bare her posting's side effects, from the droll to the devastating, sets her book apart. She also helps explain a breed that is no longer the rare bird it was in, say, Vietnam: the female war correspondent. Spinner captures our simultaneous urge to prove how unflappable we are -- she took the title Tell Them I Didn't Cry from her own shell-shocked but defiant words after escaping a terrifying kidnapping attempt -- and balances it against her unmistakably feminine impulses. She bakes cookies to win over suspicious policemen, forges intense friendships with her translators and just happens to be the person in the bureau who whips up fabulous Friday night dinners. None of which, of course, answers the 10-year-old's question. Why put ourselves in harm's way, only to have readers complain (as many of Spinner's did) that press coverage of Iraq is negative and unpatriotic? "I didn't become a journalist to serve my country," Spinner explains. "I became a journalist to serve the story." That means documenting the anguish of a country for which Americans now bear enormous responsibility. It means telling the truth and hoping that our Iraqi colleagues, many of them as fearful of insurgents today as they were of Saddam Hussein, will do the same. It means showing readers that the lives of Iraqis are just as important as ours. Spinner reminds us of all of these essentials, and then some. "If you're there, risking your life," she writes, "you want someone, anyone, to understand why you are there." Her fine book widens the circle of people who will. Ilene R. Prusher, Jerusalem bureau chief of the Christian Science Monitor, began covering Iraq during the U.S.-led invasion in 2003. Reviewed by Ilene R. Prusher
Copyright 2006, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.
See all Editorial Reviews
Product Details
|