Terry Gould

This book is fascinating and deserves a wide reading. The book contains the stories of six journalists who paid for their integrity and courage with their lives.

The stories cover journalists from Latin America, Bangladesh, the Philippines, Iraq and Russia.

What makes journalists brave and willing to take risks despite knowing the threat to their lives? In each case, there is a different answer. Lest we forget, there are brave and honest people in the world.

My only gripe with the book is that Terry Gould did not highlight the forces and incidents that made them change. These sometimes got lost in the stories of their lives. The detail is fascinating, but for a person far removed from the lives of these brave people, the tales can get tedious.

All in all, it is a fascinating book and one that deserves a wide reading.

The people covered:

Guillermo Bravo Vega
Marlene Garcia-Esperat
Manik Chandra Saha
Anna Politkovskaya
Valery Ivanov & Alexei Sidorov
Khalid V. Hassan

Remember their names.… (more)

I of course took this out from the library looking for salacious details of the swingers being interviewed, but this is actually a well-written, compassionate and funny piece of journalism on the structure of swinger communities and the prejudice they face from the "straight" world. The author makes the good point that while the mainstream media is much more progressive than before regarding LGBT communities, swingers are still portrayed as perverted, dangerous in the age of AIDS (and even more interestingly, ugly and desperate) by stories published in such venues as GQ, Marie Claire, Elle, and Penthouse, for god's sake. While Gould makes clear that he has no inclination towards swinging himself (in the introduction, he notes that he never "cheated" on his wife during his research at clubs and conventions), he doesn't distance himself from his interviewees (he is game to view anything, and even serves as an erotic costume party judge during one event). The result is that he imbues them with a greater ordinariness than most writers have.… (more)