Embedded: The Media at War in Iraq - Hardcover

BILL KATOVSKY lives in northern California.

TIMOTHY CARLSON lives in Colorado.

Embedded, The Media at War in Iraq is a collection of deeply emotional and highly personal accounts of what it was like to cover the Iraq War. Many of the world's top war correspondents and photographers speak candidly about life on the battlefield. Here are articulate and heartfelt descriptions of fear and firefights, of bullets and banalities, of risking death and meeting deadlines.
With over 60 interviews conducted in Kuwait and Iraq and shortly after many returned home, Katovsky and Carlson allowed these brave men and women to step outside their professional role as journalists and examine the lethal allure of combat reporting.
Embedding has a special meaning for combat correspondents far beyond a limited definition of being placed within U.S. or British military units. Even non-embedded or independent reporters faced being entrapped in the propaganda gears of an unstoppable military machine. For some journalists, being an embed meant being in bed with the troops. For others, it meant free transportation, three squares a day, and a front-row seat to the big show where careers are made and adrenaline runs wild.
Here is CBS Evening News Correspondent Jim Axelrod discussing the perils of racing to Baghdad while despondent over the death of a television colleague and being unexpectedly comforted by ABC Nightline's Ted Koppel; Newsweek reporter Scott Johnson unwittingly driving into an ambush and then kicking out the windshield of his bullet-riddled car to escape the Iraqi gunmen; New York Times Baghdad Bureau Chief John Burns' brave refusal to be intimidated by his Iraqi information ministry minders; husband and wife, Peter Baker and Susan Glasser, Washington Post Moscow Bureau Chiefs, though separated on the battlefield, still stay in touch each night by satellite phone; Fox News Producer and Reporter Maya Zumwalt, granddaughter of a U.S. Navy legend, is treated as family by her battalion of brothers - the 82nd Airborne; Orange County Register reporter Gordon Dillow is forced to swap his notebook for a grenade during an ambush; Time magazine photographer Yuri Kozyrev locates the touching symbol of the war in a Baghdad hospital; Los Angeles Times writer David Zucchino spends several nights in Saddam's vacated palace; and Detroit News Reporter John Bebow hangs tough in bad-guy country with a colonel airlifted from Apocalypse Now.
Each interview in Embedded maps its own personal path and narrative arc, while presenting an emotional window to war and reporting. Taken individually, each offers a unique view of f0the most-covered war in history. Collectively, Embedded is an eyewitness to history and will do for the war in Iraq what Michael Herr's Dispatches did for Vietnam.