In shortish chapters that don’t tax your patience this memoir by BBC reporter Nick Bryant divulges little known aspects of a foreign correspondent’s life. It is as engrossing as Peter Greste’s account of his time in the Middle East, though in many ways different from that book. For a start, Bryant was never jailed for doing his job, as Greste was; what struck me most forcefully reading ‘Adventures in Correspondentland’ is the author’s sense of humour. It’s there in the ridiculous title and the amusing illustrations on the front cover. There’s also the prose, although at times I felt it could have been tightened up a notch so that it might read more smoothly.
Not all memoirs by journos are readable, as Les Hinton’s deplorable effort demonstrated. Perhaps News Corp knew of their man’s literary deficit and so promoted him to somewhere in the organisation where he wouldn’t be at risk of writing anything. Bryant, on the other hand, can write well, his carefully crafted sentences delivering each anecdote with confidence but also with frequent, silent laughter. It’s like being regaled at a dinner party by a competent raconteur, someone with a capacity to see an interesting story and to tell it with flair.
Bryant takes the reader behind the scenes to show him or her what life was like in, say, Afghanistan at a time of radical change. The book starts mid-story, in Afghanistan at the middle (to that point in time) of his career, and each chapter focuses on a different period. There’re sections of the book about Lady Di, Bill Clinton’s impeachment, 9/11, Guantanamo Bay, and Steve Irwin’s death. It wasn’t certain to me, while reading the book, who he intended his audience to be though for some bizarre reason known only to himself and his editors he calls university “college”, so perhaps he was hoping it might do well in the States.
It serves as something of an apologia, in two respects. Bryant firstly regrets the failings of some foreign correspondents due to what he admits can be a ghoulish appetite for evidence of bloodshed and other kinds of calamity. He also appears to regret not being more critical of the US administration in the years immediately following 9/11. In respect of the first charge, Bryant is at pains to absolve himself, as well as most of his colleagues, of voyeurism. As for the second charge, his apology is somewhat mealy-mouthed and docile.
In general there’s a certain aloofness from the concerns of the common man. To underscore my point he also decries globalisation on account of its homogenising effects, but by doing so only makes his own position as a rich westerner more obvious. For poor Indian 15-year-old girls it might be far preferable to get a job at Starbucks than in a brothel, and while he goes out of his way to condemn child prostitution he is also able at any time get on a plane and go somewhere in the first world, for example the US, where he now lives.
Bryant knows the absurd when he sees it but nevertheless genuinely admires the US and seems loathe to condemn it on any level. Despite having studied American history at Oxford Uni it looks as though he long ago drank the Kool-Aid.
His stint after India was in Australia and his privilege is evident in the fact that though his opinion of that country is largely correct, you can tell that he has always had enough money to support himself as he doesn’t seem to adequately value such things as a decent minimum wage and free access to most medical services that is available to the majority living Down Under. Sadly there are no comparisons made to arrangements that obtain in the old US of A. Like his opinions about multinational corporations operating in the developing world, this lack of objective good sense was reinforced for me by his expressed distaste for the British monarchy; he’s genuinely puzzled by Australians’ loyalty to the House of Windsor. Bryant might not be aware of any personal bias – he comes across as blithe, erudite, yet not overly self-aware – though a genuine interest in history makes you feel confident, in a general sense, of his perspicacity. Unlike Greste – who as the BBC’s foreign correspondent covered Afghanistan in 1995, and who was arrested in Egypt in 2014 while working for Al Jazeera English – Bryant’s a puzzle.
For news junkies his book, though now a tad out of date, offers plenty of interest; it brought back memories of a time that, unsurprisingly now, seems more and more remote. And Bryant is even-handed: he sees the good side of George W. Bush but laments almost-universal fawning on the US establishment following 9/11. Personally, I don’t remember much about what was in the news in the period immediately after that day because I’d just returned to Australia from overseas and when it dawned I hadn’t yet taken the community’s pulse (I arrived in Sydney on almost the same day the Twin Towers were hit). But I remember the time around 2003 when public rhetoric began to be inflected differently because of the crisis that had started to overtake the Middle East and that, regrettably, is still at issue.
Not all memoirs by journos are readable, as Les Hinton’s deplorable effort demonstrated. Perhaps News Corp knew of their man’s literary deficit and so promoted him to somewhere in the organisation where he wouldn’t be at risk of writing anything. Bryant, on the other hand, can write well, his carefully crafted sentences delivering each anecdote with confidence but also with frequent, silent laughter. It’s like being regaled at a dinner party by a competent raconteur, someone with a capacity to see an interesting story and to tell it with flair.
Bryant takes the reader behind the scenes to show him or her what life was like in, say, Afghanistan at a time of radical change. The book starts mid-story, in Afghanistan at the middle (to that point in time) of his career, and each chapter focuses on a different period. There’re sections of the book about Lady Di, Bill Clinton’s impeachment, 9/11, Guantanamo Bay, and Steve Irwin’s death. It wasn’t certain to me, while reading the book, who he intended his audience to be though for some bizarre reason known only to himself and his editors he calls university “college”, so perhaps he was hoping it might do well in the States.
It serves as something of an apologia, in two respects. Bryant firstly regrets the failings of some foreign correspondents due to what he admits can be a ghoulish appetite for evidence of bloodshed and other kinds of calamity. He also appears to regret not being more critical of the US administration in the years immediately following 9/11. In respect of the first charge, Bryant is at pains to absolve himself, as well as most of his colleagues, of voyeurism. As for the second charge, his apology is somewhat mealy-mouthed and docile.
In general there’s a certain aloofness from the concerns of the common man. To underscore my point he also decries globalisation on account of its homogenising effects, but by doing so only makes his own position as a rich westerner more obvious. For poor Indian 15-year-old girls it might be far preferable to get a job at Starbucks than in a brothel, and while he goes out of his way to condemn child prostitution he is also able at any time get on a plane and go somewhere in the first world, for example the US, where he now lives.
Bryant knows the absurd when he sees it but nevertheless genuinely admires the US and seems loathe to condemn it on any level. Despite having studied American history at Oxford Uni it looks as though he long ago drank the Kool-Aid.
His stint after India was in Australia and his privilege is evident in the fact that though his opinion of that country is largely correct, you can tell that he has always had enough money to support himself as he doesn’t seem to adequately value such things as a decent minimum wage and free access to most medical services that is available to the majority living Down Under. Sadly there are no comparisons made to arrangements that obtain in the old US of A. Like his opinions about multinational corporations operating in the developing world, this lack of objective good sense was reinforced for me by his expressed distaste for the British monarchy; he’s genuinely puzzled by Australians’ loyalty to the House of Windsor. Bryant might not be aware of any personal bias – he comes across as blithe, erudite, yet not overly self-aware – though a genuine interest in history makes you feel confident, in a general sense, of his perspicacity. Unlike Greste – who as the BBC’s foreign correspondent covered Afghanistan in 1995, and who was arrested in Egypt in 2014 while working for Al Jazeera English – Bryant’s a puzzle.
For news junkies his book, though now a tad out of date, offers plenty of interest; it brought back memories of a time that, unsurprisingly now, seems more and more remote. And Bryant is even-handed: he sees the good side of George W. Bush but laments almost-universal fawning on the US establishment following 9/11. Personally, I don’t remember much about what was in the news in the period immediately after that day because I’d just returned to Australia from overseas and when it dawned I hadn’t yet taken the community’s pulse (I arrived in Sydney on almost the same day the Twin Towers were hit). But I remember the time around 2003 when public rhetoric began to be inflected differently because of the crisis that had started to overtake the Middle East and that, regrettably, is still at issue.
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