This is a book about what makes photojournalists who report from the front lines tick. No surprise, it is adrenaline, and a bottomless ability to see themselves as the truth-tellers, and everyone else as being unable to measure up. They require few entanglements, boundless courage, and a little bit of denial that things ae as bad as they seem. This is a quick read that takes one trough all these emotions and out at the end of the book we are a bit thrilled and a bit jaded.
The author knows what he is talking about--he has reported from Africa for the Irish Times and from the Middle East for the Sydney Morning Herald and the Age, so we can be fairly certain that many of the events and some of the characters are based on reality. Which won't exactly make them feel flattered. O'Loughlin is most scathing about the "bigfoots" - those high-profile senior broadcasters and journalists who arrive at trouble spots in their neatly pressed safari jackets and casually bounce the local correspondent out of the frame before zooming off home again.
It is a book that provokes, but it also makes one pause and reflect. At one point, back in Dublin, Simmons remarks to a colleague that "most people who live vicariously do it through other people, but what if you tried to live vicariously through yourself?" His colleague wonders what he means by that and so does Simmons, although he thinks it sounds quite clever. Perhaps it is. Perhaps Simmons has captured, in that thought, the seductive essence of being a foreign correspondent. Wonderful read.
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