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. (Aug.)
FYI:This is the first volume in a series of Newseum-produced books.
