Breaking News: A Stunning and Memorable Account of Reporting from Some of the Most Dangerous Places in the World
Written by Martin Fletcher
Narrated by Stephen Hoye
3/5
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About this audiobook
These extraordinary, real-life adventure stories each examine different dilemmas facing a foreign correspondent. Can you eat the food of a warlord who stole it from the starving? Do you listen politely to a terrorist threatening to blow up your children? Do you ask the tough questions of a Khmer Rouge killer, knowing he is your only ticket out of the Cambodian jungle? And, above all, how do you stay sane when you're faced with so much pain?
Martin Fletcher
Martin Fletcher was 12 years old when he survived the Bradford fire in which his father, brother, uncle and grandfather were all killed. As an adult he has devoted himself to investigating and seeking the truth about the disaster, and Fifty-Six is the culmination of his extensive research. During that time he has also obtained a BA in Politics with International Studies and MA in International Political Economy from the University of Warwick, together with both the LPC and ACA. He lives in London.
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Reviews for Breaking News
9 ratings2 reviews
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Here is a book published in 2008 about Martin Fletcher's dangerous career that started in earnest with his own filmography during 1974 when he was on scene for the fighting in the Yom Kippur war. The interesting thing about the episodes in this book, is that he begins the book explaining how many colleagues did not survive the dangerous journeys that reporting on unrest and war zones required them to travel to, and how he lost people in his travel group to land mines and other hazards. He never gives up, and he puts each incident in its own compartamentalized area of his mental and film diary. It's all in the can, Martin Fletcher, but let me mention that it's tough on the reader to get through it all, for there's not a dent in your teflon thick skin until much much later in this biographical tale.If you're like me, you'll be astonished that he has thrown himself all in, time after time, to just suck the gory photo-ops into his film reel as if he is a disembodied mechanistic security camera. Then he parties hearty. The difference that comes across is just that Martin has a quixotic mercurial role to repeat in each day of his working life when he blindly rushes among armored vehicles or refugee tents and fills more and more film cans as he shifts himself into the audience/historian/unbiased reporter role - talking with war lords and their victims alike. He is savvy about the gut-wrenching attention-getting situations that will grab viewers, but is not able to convincingly register any unanalytical Moments except as they might affect Martin's standing in his news team. For those of you who stick around to the latter chapters, just let me hint there is some movement toward humanity at the end of that period of life where he seems to lack peripheral vision apart from what fits in his viewfinder.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5In this book, NBC foreign correspondent Martin Fletcher talks about his career in journalism, which lead to covering a number of horrific events from suicide bombers in Israel to genocide in Rwanda. Along the way, he also stops to discuss journalistic ethics (is it worse to film a dying person so that their final moments aren't peaceful or to not film them so that the world remains oblivious to suffering and does nothing to stop it?), his own family's history as Holocaust survivors -- and victims -- and the role this plays in his views toward the 'good guys' and 'bad guys' in each conflict he records, and the ways his field and he personally sometimes failed (like unwittingly amplifying the effects of colonialism in Somalia). Although a little bit dated at times (e.g., a reference to Bin Laden still alive and in hiding), this book is interesting and thought-provoking. It is not for the faint of heart as Fletcher describes in some detail violent deaths that he witnessed, or reports on the experiences of those who narrowly survived horrific acts of violence. This isn't exactly a history book, although Fletcher usually provides the most relevant information; however, some readers may want to brush on their modern events knowledge before or after reading this.