Librarian and English Language Learning Instructor Janet Ross-Heiner recommends On All Fronts by Clarissa Ward.
It is July, the time when our valley of cottonwood comes alive! The little pinhead unvarnished town (as someone noted) welcomes all with grandeur. The green hillsides are popping with color. The airstrip glistens of winged metal and aluminum fiber under the shadows of scattered cumulus clouds. Allen & Company arrives first and then the Sun Valley Writers’ Conference (SVWC). We eagerly wait! The Community Library savors the SVWC. Revving up literally! Do you know one can buy a 3-day pass to the SVWC Live Streamed Watch Party at The Argyros? Go to the SVWC.com website!
Part of the appeal of book reviewing is that one can exist in the same moment as the writer. That is exciting and risky because you do not have anyone else’s thoughts to mediate between you and the book.
On All Fronts invites the reader into war conflicts and a journalist’s life. Clarissa Ward has a fierce intellect and a passion for broad perspectives of journalism, most of all getting the news to people. As our multipolar world today is changing, journalists are being targeted around the globe—most aggressively in Gaza.
Every journalist killed is a further blow to our understanding of the world.
Clarissa Ward’s memoir bearing witness to war is impressive. When the World Trade Centers’ Twin Towers were hit in 2001, Clarissa made it her mission to seek the story on the front and firsthand. Her career started in 2002 as an intern at CNN’S Moscow bureau. She speaks six languages including Arabic, French, Italian, Russian, Mandarin and Spanish, and graduated with distinction from Yale University. Her career story is evocative and engaging.
Her writing invites the reader to see and understand conflicts from both sides.
Her unique expertise opens an aperture with insight, as she shares how professional journalism got the war in Iraq wrong. Tricks were being tactfully used to leak disinformation. Illusions were created, and there is an argument lifted to acknowledge truth. Clarissa has a critical eye when it comes to war.
What I loved about her extraordinary story was her witness to the truth.
She accompanied the people, she sat with the Taliban with reciprocal respect. Clarissa felt coming back from war was harder than being there. How to balance two realities. How to straddle two worlds, how to square the different lives. The book is riveted with smarts, family, empathy, and geopolitical questioning with strong reporting. As an extraordinary journalist, Clarissa exemplified in her critical writing; one person’s terrorists are another person’s freedom fighters. When I lived in Nicaragua during the Contra war, I used the same phrase frequently.
Clarissa’s lens is wide; living in Beijing, Baghdad, Beirut, Moscow, London, and New York, along with reporting in and out of major hot spots in the world. I invite you to discover Clarissa Ward and her fine book On All Fronts.
