Books like Still Time To Die

In the mid-1930s a young journalist slipped past Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist forces into the northwest of China to find out if the Communists were Red Bandits or a legitimate political movement. Edgar Snow found they were the latter.

His eyewitness account – which read like an adventure story – reverberated around the globe and catapulted him to the top of his profession. As a correspondent for the Saturday Evening Post, he roved the world during World War II.

His career came crashing down with McCarthyism, but for two decades Snow remained one of the few American links with the People’s Republic of China. I was so inspired by Snow’s book that I later wrote his biography. In doing the research I was struck by how many Americans of his generation wanted to be like him. 

Vincent Sheean’s memoir, published in 1935, stands out because it established a genre of memoir writing by foreign correspondents and because of its high literacy value.

“It has now been 30 years or more since Vincent Sheean wrote his Personal History,” commented Saturday Review of Literature editor Norman Cousins commented years later. “Many of the foreign correspondents have tried to convey the same sense of an intimate, interactive relationship with events and people that gave such luster to Sheean’s book.”

Sheean’s still-young career had spanned the globe for Europe, to North Africa and the Middle East, to the 1920s revolution in China, to the Soviet Union. His story was about himself insofar as it described how the news felt to him.

The events he witnessed proved the most important of the period in which he lived. Sheean went on in a similar fashion after the book appeared, displaying almost… show more.

I vividly recall reading Farson’s book when I was a budding journalist.

Farson worked for the Chicago Daily News, a newspaper that is gone now, but was pioneer in modern American journalism, not only for its principled reporting but also its talented staff. The Daily News was the first to field a substantial corps of American reporters abroad. (The New York Times only did so much later.)

Farson was everywhere, which did not distinguish him from many other correspondents, but he was legendary for the high quality of his writing. His colleagues said he was a “combination Childe Harold and Captain from Castile.” 

Unhappy with the request that he come back to Chicago to work awhile, he quit and went to Dalmatia to write Way of the Transgressor.  

When the Great Depression hit and jobs were scarce, there was no point in hanging around at home. 

“Prices in Europe were down to rock bottom,” wrote Albion Ross of his first overseas trip in 1930. “In addition, Mussolini’s government, for some inscrutable Fascist reason, was offering students a fantastic third-class railway ticket that took you from the Channel ports round and about through France and Italy for next to nothing.”

He found a spot in Berlin with the New York Evening Post and later The New York Times. Apart from a stint in the military during the war, he remained an overseas reporter for years.

His memoir is extraordinary because it is short on derring-do and long on sensitivity about what he witnessed. It is perhaps for this reason that neither Ross nor his book are much remembered. I would not have known about it if he had… show more.

A former Apache helicopter pilot with multiple deployments under his belt, Don combines his, “been there, done that” with, “write what you know.”

Fans of relentless action and adrenaline should not pass up on Bentley’s Matt Drake series. Or his Jack Ryan Jr. books carrying on the Tom Clancy legacy. Or the next installment of the Mitch Rapp series as he takes over for Vince Flynn’s legacy. Seriously, Don is a busy man. 

In Without Sanction, Bentley’s protagonist experiences both mental and physical manifestations of PTSD, but it’s Don’s description of survivor’s guilt that is truly chilling in its accuracy and moving in its portrayal.

As you read the account of what Drake now has to live with, what he wrestles with on a daily basis, it brings about in the reader a sense of foreboding as close to the real thing as you might imagine.

Only those who… show more.

Pour yourself a double before cracking open Clarissa Ward’s outstanding memoir. A polyglot who seems to have been imbued with very little fear from birth, Ward has an incredible capacity to find the heart of the story, whether it’s in the middle of Moscow or the center of a Bangladeshi river. As a reader, her experiences and prose swept me along as she dove into some of the world’s most consequential combat zones. 

But wrapped in this non-stop adrenaline rush is a rare account of the cost of this kind of life on reporters. More than any of the other books on this list, Ward explores the toll born by combat journalists. With heartrending detail, she delves into the death of so many friends and colleagues who made up her world that seemed to crumble a little more with each of their passings. Equally moving are her nuanced descriptions of… show more.

What can I say? I cried more than a few times reading Lindsey Hilsum’s humanizing and deeply personal biography of Marie Colvin. Hilsum’s brilliant portrait paints a figure that burns a little too brightly with life to live long in this world of ours. 

She took her first reporting job with UPI and then transferred to the Sunday Times where she garnered the Sunday Times where she garnered the reputation of the kind of reporter who could get stories that no one else could. She was the first to interview Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi, and Hilsum’s heart-pounding description put me right in the bunker with her as she nervously clicked on her tape recorder for the interview under the watchful gaze of several armed guards. From there, Colvin covered some of the 1990s' most consequential combat zones, reflecting the chaos that ensued from the dissolution of the Soviet Union. In… show more.

Janine Di Giovanni is a daring foreign correspondent with decades of experience covering the Middle East. Her reporting from the trenches is riveting.

She takes you inside the massacres, as she waits in halls, tunnels, and burned-out buildings with those whose stories she came to tell. If it wasn’t true, this book would be read alongside the best thriller writers. 

I didn’t know much about Syria before picking up this book.

But reading it, I discovered that Syria is a place where international politics, ideology, colonial legacy, religion, economics, and ordinary human survival all collide at once, which makes it both incredibly important and incredibly difficult to understand, let alone sum up simply. Hence, this book demands quite a commitment from the reader.

Nonetheless, at the end of it, I was left with a better understanding of how today’s Syria is the result of the interplay between many global processes. Time and time again, he says, we see how developments in Syria are never determined by purely domestic factors but are instead shaped by the powerful forces they have no control over. You have to feel for this long-suffering nation!

The definitive account so far of the Syrian civil war, and of the insurgency against the dictatorship of Bashar Assad. Sam Dagher combines a literary sensibility, deep knowledge of Syria, and acquaintance with the people on the ground, and an ability for tireless and dogged reporting and truth-seeking. The passages dealing with the Assad regime’s slaughter of arrested civilians in its jails are harrowing and are a reminder of the horrifying nature of this regime and the need for it to remain isolated and under pressure. At the same time, Dagher remains a cool and dispassionate analyst of the progress of the conflict, and of the factors which enabled the regime and its allies to prevail.