Critic Reviews
Good
Based on 6 reviews on
The long buried story of three extraordinary female journalists who permanently shattered the official and cultural barriers to women covering war. Kate Webb, an Australian iconoclast, Catherine Leroy, a French dare devil photographer, and Frances FitzGerald, a blue-blood American intellectual, arrived in Vietnam with starkly different life experiences but one shared purpose: to report on the most consequential story of the decade. At a time when women were considered unfit to be foreign reporters, Frankie, Catherine and Kate paid their own way to war, arrived without jobs, challenged the rules imposed on them by the military, ignored the belittlement and resentment of their male peers and found new ways to explain the war through the people who lived through it. In You Don't Belong Here, Elizabeth Becker uses these women's work and lives to illuminate the Vietnam War from the 1965 American buildup, through the Tet Offensive, the expansion into Cambodia, the American defeat and its aftermath. Arriving herself in the last years of the war, Elizabeth writes as an historian and a witness to what these women accomplished. What emerges is an unforgettable story of three journalists forging their place in a land of men, often at great personal sacrifice, and forever altering the craft of war reportage for generations. Deeply reported and filled with personal letters, interviews, and profound insight, You Don't Belong Here fills a void in the history of women and of war.
Peter Baker is a journalist for the New York Times.
George Packer reviews two fascinating new books, one about women war correspondents and one by one of our leading women war correspondents: “You Don’t Belong Here” by @Elizbeckerwrite and “The Spymaster of Baghdad” by @mideastmargaret https://t.co/z2zXvlEdJZ
Host of the Cold War Channel and a grad student, studying military history. History exists in shades of grey and yet so many seek only black or white.
@amandademmer @JasonAHiggins A chapter or two from Wall's "Street Without Joy" is a good way to introduce the idea that American involvement wasn't the start of the war? "You Don't Belong Here" by Elizabeth Becker is an interesting window into a different facet of the war too
The Society of the Four Arts, a unique cultural destination for art, music, films, gardens, children's events & more.
King Library summer book discussions continue with "You Don’t Belong Here: How Three Women Rewrote The Story Of War" on Tuesday, May 17 at 5:30 p.m. https://t.co/H1McgFZWbn
"An incisive history of the Vietnam War via the groundbreaking accomplishments of three remarkable women journalists.... A deft, richly illuminating perspective on the Vietnam War."
--Kirkus Reviews--Geraldine Brooks, Pulitzer Prize winning author of MARCH, former Wall Street Journal foreign correspondent