From Publishers Weekly
Often only hours before you took that first sip of ricard or your martini... you had been watching a medic give up on a kid of eighteen or nineteen and flip a cold poncho over his face. Often you could hear the artillery of a battle across the Saigon River. So Kate Webb, a former UPI correspondent, recalls her days as a reporter in Vietnam, moving back and forth between the devastation of the field and the decadent and chaotic nightlife of Saigon. Her story is part of War Torn: Stories of War from the Women Reporters Who Covered Vietnam, written by former correspondents including Denby Fawcett, Jurate Kazickas and UPI's Webb and Tracy Wood. The book collects nine reporters' memoirs that recall the period of 1966 1975, when women's reportage, as Gloria Emerson notes in her introduction, was much rarer than today.
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.
From Library Journal
Women correspondents in Vietnam were a rarity and frequently discouraged by the military as well as by paternalistic editors who resisted giving them combat assignments. But the nine women reporters whose harrowing war stories are recounted here e.g., Bartimus (Associated Press), Edie Lederer (Associated Press), Anne Merrick (ABC-TV), Laura Palmer (ABC and NBC Radio), and more were determined to go to Vietnam to cover the biggest story of their generation. In the course of their work, one was captured and imprisoned by the enemy and two others were seriously injured. For each woman Vietnam was a life-changing event, her "phantom limb," as Bartimus calls it. These powerful stories of sex, drugs, fear, adventure, horror, and pathos, as well as "the unabashed love" that these reporters observed the men on the battlefield expressing to one another, offer a new perspective on the war and warfare journalism that should be in demand in all public and academic libraries. Highly recommended. Faye Powell, Portland State Univ. Lib., OR
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.
