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Product Details
Scribner, August 2007
Trade Paperback, 288 pages
ISBN-10: 0743288556
ISBN-13: 9780743288552
Description
In her gripping account of the Iraq war, Jackie Spinner goes beyond the headlines to reveal the challenges of reporting news in a place where danger and fear accompany journalists everywhere. This is a vivid and personal story of her time in Iraq -- where for thirteen months she covered the war from its center in Baghdad, Fallujah, Kurdistan, and Abu Ghraib -- and of being transformed from a naive woman and rookie correspondent into a seasoned foreign reporter.
Jackie's account is punctuated by brief vignettes written by her identical twin sister, Jenny, who watched as Jackie was drawn further and further into a world increasingly fraught with danger. Every morning she looked for Jackie's byline in the Post, knowing only then that her sister had survived another day.
Through it all -- the violence and fear as well as the moments of humor, camaraderie, and warmth -- Jackie Spinner brings home, with brilliant intensity and candor, what it is like to report on a war under exceptional circumstances.
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Browse Inside Tell Them I Didn't Cry"This is a moving, personal account of a young woman's head-first immersion into a war where she finds unexpected beauty and love and unimagined horrors and loss. Jackie Spinner offers readers of her fine, tender book important insight into a country that will for generations be intricately tied to the lives of all Americans."
-- Matthew McAllester, Newsday correspondent and author of Blinded by the Sunlight: Surviving Abu Ghraib and Saddam's Iraq
-- Matthew McAllester, Newsday correspondent and author of Blinded by the Sunlight: Surviving Abu Ghraib and Saddam's Iraq
"The Iraq story has long needed a woman's touch, and Jackie Spinner tells this war tale better than any account I've seen: how and why American journalists risk everything to report the most dangerous story on earth. She takes a welcome departure from our male-slanted view of Iraq, putting a human face on the soldiers, truck drivers, translators, American and Iraqi families, and, yes, journalists as they cope with the overwhelming anxieties of life in the crosshairs."
-- Tod Robberson, correspondent, The Dallas Morning News
-- Tod Robberson, correspondent, The Dallas Morning News
"Jackie Spinner's book is not only a war memoir full of precisely detailed encounters with fear and death. It is also an odyssey of closely observed and beautifully sequenced stages of an emotional and professional life as a reporter for The Washington Post in Iraq. She pulls no punches; truth prevails over cant, over precooked templates of patriotism and its opposite, irony and sarcasm."
-- Ellen Mickiewicz, Director, DeWitt Wallace Center for Media and Democracy, Duke University
-- Ellen Mickiewicz, Director, DeWitt Wallace Center for Media and Democracy, Duke University
"Not just a reporter's dispatch on the Iraq war, Jackie Spinner's book is a journalistic original and a rare insight into both a reporter's mind and the heart of a people at war. Unlike any other chronicle of the war, this book draws the reader into the lives of the subjects of journalism, the real people of a country in chaos, and makes us care about them. As a journalist, I saw a side of the story I had not yet seen. As a Marine who has spent time in Iraq, I came away from this book caring more about the outcome of our nation's effort."
-- Andrew B. Davis, President and Executive Director, American Press Institute
-- Andrew B. Davis, President and Executive Director, American Press Institute
