Don McCullin, one of the UK's best photojournalists, has written a
number of books about his extraordinary life - first as a
photographer attached to the Observer and then with The Sunday
Times. This is perhaps the best of them - a straightforward account
of a career which has placed him in more dangerous situations than
anyone else would want to shake a camera at. Every chapter in the
book shows him in yet another war zone - with the mercenaries in
the Congo (led by the truly awful 'Mad' Mike Hoare); in Vietnam,
picking up something someone had dropped, to find it was a severed
human foot; in Biafra, watching women burning like torches; as a
prisoner of Idi Amin - perhaps the most frightening experience of
his life; on the Golan Heights, in Amman and El Salvador. These are
sights, as he says, 'that should, and do, bring pain, and shame,
and guilt'- his anecdotes are bloody and terrible. At the end of
each chapter, the question for the reader is: but why did he carry
on, why after a short period of leave at home, did he set off for
yet another war, knowing very well indeed that he would be likely
at some stage to find himself, again, standing in line with a group
of other prisoners - 'journalists - dirty men', as one Congolese
officer scornfully said as he ordered up the firing squad? As John
le Carre has said, 'he has known all forms of fear, he's an expert
in it.' The other question is how McCullin managed to survive when
so many guns were pointed, cold-bloodedly, straight at his chest.
It is always difficult to know, when a book is written 'with'
another writer - in this case the experienced Lewis Chester - just
how much credit should go to the protagonist; in this case there
can be no doubt - these nightmares are Don McCullin's own, and no
one can finish this book without being (a) thankful that the
experiences are not their own, and (b) being grateful that someone
has had the courage to record them. (Kirkus UK)
'If this was just a book of McCullin's war photographs it would be valuable enough. But it is much more' Sunday Correspondent
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