In Extremis; The Life and Death of the War Correspondent Marie Colvin

xviii, 378, [2]. Illustrations. "Reports of My Survival May Be Exaggerated," by Alan Jenkins. Sources. Index. The dust jacket some wear and soiling around the edges as well as a small tear at the top left on the front of the cover. Lindsey Hilsum (born 3 August 1958) is an English television journalist and writer. She is the International Editor for Channel 4 News, and has reported from six continents, including coverage of the major conflicts in Syria, Iraq, Kosovo, Rwanda and Ukraine in the past two decades. She is also a regular contributor to The Sunday Times, The Observer, The Guardian, New Statesman, and Granta. Hilsum is author of the books Sandstorm: Libya in the Time of Revolution (2012) and In Extremis: The Life and Death of the War Correspondent Marie Colvin (2018). She is the recipient of several awards, among which are the Patron's Medal from the Royal Geographical Society in 2017, and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize in the biography category for In Extremis. In Extremis was shortlisted for the 2019 Costa Book Awards in the biography category, and won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize in the Biography category. When deciding what is acceptable to broadcast from conflict zones, she argues that the crucial question is whether "you are using those images as propaganda, or whether you are using them to try and tell people the truth about war". She concedes that this "is a very difficult thing to get right", but is emphatic that it is not the place of a foreign correspondent to manipulate emotive images "to make a political point". When Marie Colvin was killed in an artillery attack in Homs, Syria, in 2012, at age fifty-six, the world lost a fearless and iconoclastic war correspondent who covered the most significant global calamities of her lifetime. In Extremis, written by her fellow reporter Lindsey Hilsum, is a thrilling investigation into Colvin's epic life and tragic death based on exclusive access to her intimate diaries from age thirteen to her death, interviews with people from every corner of her life, and impeccable research. After growing up in a middle-class Catholic family on Long Island, Colvin studied with the legendary journalist John Hersey at Yale, and eventually started working for The Sunday Times of London, where she gained a reputation for bravery and compassion as she told the stories of victims of the major conflicts of our time. She lost sight in one eye while in Sri Lanka covering the civil war, interviewed Gaddafi and Arafat many times, and repeatedly risked her life covering conflicts in Chechnya, East Timor, Kosovo, and the Middle East. Colvin lived her personal life in extremis, too: bold, driven, and complex, she was married twice, took many lovers, drank and smoked, and rejected society's expectations for women. Despite PTSD, she refused to give up reporting. Like her hero Martha Gellhorn, Colvin was committed to bearing witness to the horrifying truths of war, and to shining a light on the profound suffering of ordinary people caught in the midst of conflict. Lindsey Hilsum's In Extremis is a devastating and revelatory biography of one of the greatest war correspondents of her generation. Derived from a Kirkus review: British journalist Hilsum builds on her personal experiences with reporting from war zones to relate the death-defying professional wanderings of Marie Colvin (1956-2012). Colvin lost an eye while reporting the war in Sri Lanka, and she wore a patch for her remaining years. In 2012, while working in a deadly area of Syria, she was killed by an explosion. Thanks to journals, appointment diaries, and unpublished reporting notes that she took starting at age 13, Hilsum is able to portray Colvin in remarkable fullness. "She was the most admired war correspondent of our generation," writes the author, "one whose personal life was scarred by conflict, too, and although I counted her as a friend, I understood so little about her." From an early age, she demonstrated an att.…