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Material Type | Library | Call Number | Item Barcode | Location |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Book | Searching... Andover - Memorial Hall Library | BIOGRAPHY COLVIN, MA. | 31330008734455 | Searching... Unknown |
| Book | Searching... Amesbury Public Library | B COLVIN | 32114002486836 | Searching... Unknown |
| Book | Searching... Burlington Public Library | BIO COLVIN M | 32116003605215 | Searching... Unknown |
| Book | Searching... Dracut - Moses Greeley Parker Memorial Library | BIO/COLVIN, M. | 31482002853524 | Searching... Unknown |
| Book | Searching... Dunstable Free Public Library | B COL | 32118000984544 | Searching... Unknown |
| Book | Searching... Groton Public Library | BIO COLVIN | 37003701942253 | Searching... Unknown |
| Book | Searching... Hamilton-Wenham Public Library | B COLVIN, MARIE | 30470001669471 | Searching... Unknown |
| Book | Searching... Manchester-by-the-Sea Public Library | B COLVIN 2018 | 32124001859289 | Searching... Unknown |
| Book | Searching... Merrimac Public Library | 92 COL | 32125001271284 | Searching... Unknown |
| Book | Searching... Methuen - Nevins Memorial Library | B COLVIN, M. | 31548003217008 | Searching... Unknown |
| Book | Searching... North Andover - Stevens Memorial Library | BIO COLVIN | 31478010116318 | Searching... Unknown |
| Book | Searching... Salisbury Public Library | 92 HIL | 32131000824420 | Searching... Unknown |
| Book | Searching... Westford - J.V. Fletcher Library | B COLVIN | 31990004687187 | Searching... Unknown |
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Summary
Summary
A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice. Finalist for the Costa Biography Award and long-listed for the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence. Named a Best Book of 2018 by Esquire and Foreign Policy . An Amazon Best Book of November, the Guardian Bookshop Book of November, and one of the Evening Standard 's Books to Read in November
"Now, thanks to Hilsum's deeply reported and passionately written book, [Marie Colvin] has the full accounting that she deserves." --Joshua Hammer, The New York Times
The inspiring and devastating biography of Marie Colvin, the foremost war reporter of her generation, who was killed in Syria in 2012, and whose life story also forms the basis of the feature film A Private War , starring Rosamund Pike as Colvin.
When Marie Colvin was killed in an artillery attack in Homs, Syria, in 2012, at age fifty-six, the world lost a fearless and iconoclastic war correspondent who covered the most significant global calamities of her lifetime. In Extremis , written by her fellow reporter Lindsey Hilsum, is a thrilling investigation into Colvin's epic life and tragic death based on exclusive access to her intimate diaries from age thirteen to her death, interviews with people from every corner of her life, and impeccable research.
After growing up in a middle-class Catholic family on Long Island, Colvin studied with the legendary journalist John Hersey at Yale, and eventually started working for The Sunday Times of London, where she gained a reputation for bravery and compassion as she told the stories of victims of the major conflicts of our time. She lost sight in one eye while in Sri Lanka covering the civil war, interviewed Gaddafi and Arafat many times, and repeatedly risked her life covering conflicts in Chechnya, East Timor, Kosovo, and the Middle East. Colvin lived her personal life in extremis, too: bold, driven, and complex, she was married twice, took many lovers, drank and smoked, and rejected society's expectations for women. Despite PTSD, she refused to give up reporting. Like her hero Martha Gellhorn, Colvin was committed to bearing witness to the horrifying truths of war, and to shining a light on the profound suffering of ordinary people caught in the midst of conflict.
Lindsey Hilsum's In Extremis is a devastating and revelatory biography of one of the greatest war correspondents of her generation.
Reviews (6)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Hilsum, international editor for Channel 4 News in England, chronicles American journalist Marie Colvin's experiences at the front lines of war zones in this inspiring, vivid biography. Compiling information from Colvin's personal journals and interviews with colleagues, the book traces Colvin's path as a correspondent for Britain's Sunday Times from Beirut in 1986 to the trenches of the Syrian civil war. A dedicated reporter, Colvin (1956-2012) stayed in dangerous situations against her editors' wishes and wrote with a personal empathy rare in war journalism. Her boldness led to her losing her vision in her left eye from a grenade explosion on a Sri Lankan battlefield in 1999; she wore an eye patch for the rest of her life. She died at age 56 in 2012, in a bombardment of a Syrian safe house a day after she gave a live satellite interview on CNN. The book is rich in historical context, concisely summarizing international conflicts using excerpts from Colvin's reporting ("There was no talk in the KoÅ¡are Barracks [in Yugoslavia] about zero tolerance for returning body bags. They saw too many"). This intense biography is highly recommended for everyone, including journalism junkies, history buffs, and casual readers. (Nov.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Guardian Review
A friend and fellow war reporter details Colvin's hard-drinking, hard-living decades and her inspiring career covering one humanitarian disaster after another During the Lebanese civil war in 1987, Marie Colvin was the first journalist on the scene at a Palestinian refugee camp in Beirut. The camp was under siege by Shia militia, backed by Syria's President Hafez al-Assad, which made it hazardous for journalists to enter the campand for inmates to leave to buy food. Colvin risked her life by entering, having bribed the soldiers not to shoot her. Once there, she watched as a group of women ran across the "Path of Death" to buy provisions. One was shot straight away in the head and abdomen. Colvin's story on the front page of the Sunday Times had the headline War on Women: "She lay where she had fallen, face down on the dirt path leading out of Bourj al-Barajneh." Three days later Syrian authorities ordered the militia to stop sniping. The 163-day siege was over. This was Colvin's breakthrough, aged 31. It was the first time she found that journalism could save lives. And it validated her tendency towards recklessness, emboldening her to go further into war zones than other reporters. Arguably, it was this bravery and recklessness that led to her death in Syria in 2012. Now Colvin's friend and fellow war correspondent Lindsey Hilsum has written her biography, taking Colvin from her suburban American childhood into her astonishing and inspiring career as a reporter covering one humanitarian disaster after another in Iraq, Kosovo, East Timor, Chechnya, Sri Lanka and Libya. Along the way there are love affairs, friendships and endless parties. Colvin's energy and passion were irresistible and everyone who encountered her wanted to be her friend, including Yasser Arafat and Muammar Gaddafi. Her heroine was Martha Gellhorn and the two women had a lot in common, from their backgrounds to their desire to change the world. Colvin shared Gellhorn's distrust of "all that objectivity shit". After getting trapped in Kosovo, she declared that: "When you're physically uncovering graves in Kosovo, I don't think there are two sides to the story. To me there is a right and a wrong, a morality, and if I don't report that, I don't see the reason for being there." We always have to ask ourselves whether the level of risk is worth the story. What is bravery, what is bravado? Marie Colvin She also shared Gellhorn's difficulties with sexual relationships. Both tended to flee the men who made them feel safe (Colvin described herself as "always pacing, testing the strength of the confining bars") and to make themselves dangerously vulnerable with the men who didn't. "I am so free that the atom cannot be freer," Gellhorn wrote during the second world war as her marriage to Hemingway fell apart: "I am free like nothing quite bearable, like sound waves and light." Colvin could have written this at many stages of her life, as one charismatic man after another turned out to be disappointing and unfaithful. Each time, she sought solace by holidaying with her loyal band of female friends and by escaping to a war zone. Colvin's need for war, like her drinking, seems to have become increasingly desperate over the course of her career. There are times when the book risks becoming a hagiography, but Hilsum avoids this by combining storytelling with asking important questions about what kind of service war correspondents perform and what ethical codes they should adhere to. It becomes clear that the entwined motives to get the best story and to change the world don't always inspire the same action. War reporters are employed by the newspaper or broadcaster that has sent them, so the first necessity is to get the story. During Colvin's 27 years at the Sunday Times, its culture changed so that the correspondents were competing to bring back the best stories and to take the greatest risks. Colvin said in 2010: "We always have to ask ourselves whether the level of risk is worth the story. What is bravery, what is bravado?" She seems to have struggled to distinguish between them, partly because her editors encouraged her to pursue greater feats and partly because of a complicated personal combination of competitiveness, self-destructiveness and passionate sympathy with the underdog. At every point when she drove herself and her collaborators further, she believed that she was alleviating suffering. Sometimes she was, but she was also looking for a good story and fleeing the most recent chaos she had left behind at home. These factors came together painfully in the days leading to her death. She'd been injured before, losing sight in one eye in Sri Lanka in 2001. Since then, Colvin had suffered from PTSD and was often more anxious than she was prepared to admit. Hilsum tells the story of her final week masterfully in a way that makes the end seem both inevitable and unnecessary. At a point when her bosses were calling her back, she remained in a press camp in the most dangerous part of Homs, broadcasting from a traceable satellite while knowing that she was a target for the Syrian authorities. At Colvin's funeral, her friend Jane Wellesley read some lines from St Paul's second epistle to Timothy that may have been consoling as well as wrenching for those present. "As for me, my life is already being poured as a libation, and the time has come for me to be gone." - Lara Feigel.
Kirkus Review
British journalist Hilsum (Sandstorm: Libya in the Time of Revolution, 2012) builds on her personal experiences with reporting from war zones to relate the death-defying professional wanderings of Marie Colvin (1956-2012).Colvin lost an eye while reporting the war in Sri Lanka, and she wore a patch for her remaining years. In 2012, while working in a deadly area of Syria, she was killed by an explosion. Thanks to journals, appointment diaries, and unpublished reporting notes that she took starting at age 13, Hilsum is able to portray Colvin in remarkable fullness. "She was the most admired war correspondent of our generation," writes the author, "one whose personal life was scarred by conflict, too, and although I counted her as a friend, I understood so little about her." By many indications, Colvin's childhood on Long Island, her adolescence, and her early work life didn't point to decades of dangerous work as a war correspondent. But from an early age, she also demonstrated an attraction to danger and hard living, including substance abuse and relationships with unstable men. Though some readers may pity Colvin for the life she chose, which included a periodic desire for motherhood that she never attained, most will view her life with great admiration. She was extremely loyal to friends and lovers, showed empathy for the dispossessed in war-torn, genocidal nations, and participated in unmatched global adventures. Hilsum skillfully explains the politics, economics, ethnic hatreds, and additional context of the nations where Colvin reported, with emphases on Libya, Chechnya, Zimbabwe, Kosovo, East Timor, Sierra Leone, Sri Lanka, and Syria. Mixed in with the globe-trotting, Colvin lived a complicated day-to-day life in both England and the United States, intervals explained with admirable detail and subtlety by the author, who draws on face-to-face interviews as well as the papers left behind by Colvin.A rip-roaring life rendered extremely well. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* Foreign correspondent Marie Colvin, born in New York City in 1956, a Yale graduate, and a longtime Middle East expert for the British newspaper, the Sunday Times, was a singular talent, one of the most significant war reporters of the twentieth century, and her death under fire in Syria in 2012 was a devastating loss. An icon for her bold field style and the eye patch she sported after an attack in Sri Lanka, Colvin lived a big life and left behind a body of work that covers every major conflict in the world, dating back several decades. Hers was a career ripe for biography, and journalist Hilsum, a colleague and friend, has done a masterful job of telling Colvin's story. This is riveting personal and professional history, told with skill and sincerity. Hilsum dances between Colvin's private life and exceptional reportage, which included interviews with everyone from Yasser Arafat to Mu'ammar Gaddhafi. Colvin is even credited with saving lives. Inspired by Martha Gellhorn, independent, and determined, Colvin enjoyed deep friendships and tempestuous romances. Drawing on Colvin's meticulous diaries and articles, and her own conversations with Colvin's family and friends, Hilsum has created something truly worthy of her subject, a biography that reads like high adventure, a masterwork that will draw well-deserved attention to a heroic witness.--Colleen Mondor Copyright 2018 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
the death of Marie Colvin under fire in Homs, Syria, in February 2012 was, for many who knew her, both a shock and a tragedy foretold. 1 had first met this acclaimed journalist in the Albanian mountain town of Kukes in April 1999, during the Kosovo war. Alone among the scores of reporters who had converged on this dreary outpost, Colvin had crossed the border with a member of the Kosovo Liberation Army and spent several days in a muddy trench being shelled and shot at by Serb forces. Three years later, during the Aqsa intifada, 1 saw her again. After invading the West Bank town of Jenin, a center of Palestinian militancy, and fighting from house to house for almost two weeks, the Israeli Defense Forces pulled back far enough to allow reporters to sneak in and observe the destruction. With three others, 1 walked through rubble-filled alleys and entered one of the few homes that hadn't been badly damaged. There sat Colvin - wearing the eye patch she had recently acquired after being half-blinded by a grenade in Sri Lanka - calmly sipping tea and smoking a cigarette. She had been reporting from inside the town, sheltered by a Palestinian family, throughout the battle. Lindsey Hilsum's "In Extremis: The Life and Death of the War Correspondent Marie Colvin" is an extraordinary account of one reporter's fearless and ultimately fatal dedication. The international editor of Channel 4 News in Britain and a longtime combat reporter, Hilsum was one of many colleagues drawn into Colvin's orbit. They flew in a rickety Ukrainian plane from Djibouti to Asmara to cover a 1998 war between Ethiopia and Eritrea; dined together in Tripoli, Libya; partied at Colvin's home in London and conversed on Skype just before Colvin was killed. Members of a tiny coterie of female war reporters in an overwhelmingly maledominated profession, the pair viewed themselves, Hilsum writes, as "the Thelma and Louise of the press corps." But while Hilsum eventually scaled back her risk-taking, Colvin could never leave the front lines behind. Piecing together Colvin's exuberantly messy life through more than a hundred interviews with ex-husbands, former lovers, family members, friends and colleagues, Hilsum draws an empathetic portrait of a woman whose courage often crossed into recklessness, both in combat zones and outside them. Colvin grew up in Oyster Bay, Long Island, the daughter of schoolteachers who doted on their five children. Her upbringing was Roman Catholic, suburban and comfortably middle class. At Yale, she fell under the tutelage of John Hersey, author of "Hiroshima," one of many influential figures who would shape her career. She got her start livening up a newsletter for the Teamsters in New York, jumped from there to U.P.I. and was soon dispatched to Paris. Hired away by Rupert Murdoch's Sunday Times, she made her name in 1987 with a story about watching a young woman die after being shot by a sniper during a militia siege of a Palestinian refugee camp in Beirut. The reporting she did there - excruciatingly close, filled with intimate glimpses of human suffering - established a template. "It has always seemed to me that what I write about is humanity in extremis," she would say in a 2001 feature article, "pushed to the unendurable, and that it is important to tell people what really happens in wars." Hilsum unpacks one terrifying story after another to illustrate how far Colvin was willing to go to expose the truth. Trapped in Chechnya in December 1999 during an aerial bombing campaign by the Russian Army, she and a young Russian photographer were forced to hike for days through the snowbound Caucasus to the Georgian border. Stopping to rest meant becoming a target for bombs. "She struggled to breathe, regretting every cigarette she had smoked," Hilsum writes in an excruciatingly vivid account. "Dima sat down, saying he could go no further. Marie knew that despair was even more dangerous than the cold. 'Get up! Keep moving!' she urged." Colvin also had a knack for gaining the confidence of dictators and demagogues. In 1986 she talked her way into the compound of the Libyan strongman Muammar elQaddafi in Tripoli. Hilsum delights in describing their first meeting: "After a few minutes Qaddafi entered dressed in a gray padded flight suit, sockless feet peeking from lizard skin slip-on shoes. T am Qaddafi,' he announced. 'No kidding,' Marie thought." She landed an exclusive interview and maintained contact with him for years. She befriended Yasir Arafat in exile in Tunisia, joined him on his return from the 1993 Oslo Accords and visited his Ramallah compound when it was besieged by the Israel Defense Forces in 2002. Colvin liked Arafat but sparred with him over his failure to suppress Palestinian violence; she was commissioned to write an Arafat biography, but could never find the discipline to finish it. Away from combat zones, Colvin moved easily through London high society and hosted memorable soirees in her Hammersmith home. "Elegant in a black cocktail dress, she mixed vodka martinis, the house full of actors, poets and politicians as well as journalists," Hilsum writes of one such gathering. She drank to excess, took many lovers and married twice. Her relationships with gifted but unreliable men who abused her trust left her emotionally shattered. Some anecdotes that Hilsum relates will be familiar to those who have read Marie Brenner's fine profile of Colvin in Vanity Fair, now adapted for film and republished in an anthology of Brenner's pieces, "A Private War: Marie Colvin and Other Tales of Heroes, Scoundrels, and Renegades" (Simon & Schuster, paper, $16). But Hilsum, who had full access to Colvin's notes and journals, is able to delve far deeper into her subject's complicated inner life. "I was blinded by your looks and the sex and so tried to ignore what my brain was telling me," Colvin writes in her diary after discovering her longtime partner's multiple affairs. "So I drank more and read less and my world telescoped down to yours - sex, looks and money." Colvin grew increasingly stressed and unhappy in her last decade. Many colleagues were leaving the battlefield behind, but she saw no other options. In 2001, she joined Tamil Tiger rebels in northern Sri Lanka and was hit by a grenade blast during a harrowing nighttime journey back to government territory. She soothed her nerves with larger quantities of alcohol, fretted about losing her looks, ruefully accepted that she would never have children of her own. And she took greater risks. "Use my skills as a writer to help those who can't find justice anywhere else," she wrote in her diary in 2010. "Acting despite fear - it matters." In the winter of 2012, against all advice, she joined Syrian rebels on a doomed journey into the besieged city of Homs, surrounded by Assad's army. Syrian intelligence traced her satellite phone calls (technically unsophisticated, she ignored warnings about that too) to a rebel media center and targeted the building with artillery, killing her and a young French photographer. Colvin never slowed down long enough to write a memoir. Now, thanks to Hilsum's deeply reported and passionately written book, she has the full accounting that she deserves. JOSHUA HAMMER'S most recent book is "The Bad-Ass Librarians of Timbuktu." 'What I write about,' Colvin wrote, 'is humanity in extremis.'
Library Journal Review
Acclaimed international reporter Marie Colvin (1956-2012) worked for the London Sunday Times from 1986 until her death, fearlessly covering the lives of citizens caught in the crosshairs of war. -Hilsum (international editor, Channel News 4; Sandstorm) offers an engrossing biography based on Colvin's personal journals and more than 100 interviews that describe her childhood in Long Island, her years at Yale University, her rocky marriages, and her career as a reporter. This book shines when focused on Colvin's coverage of hot spots, including Beirut, Chechnya, Sri Lanka, and Syria, where she was targeted for death by President Bashar al-Assad. She lost an eye to shrapnel in Sri Lanka, which led to PTSD, depression, and alcohol abuse, all of which plagued her for life. Snippets of Colvin's reporting woven throughout the text provide an appreciation for her sparse, moving prose. VERDICT This unputdownable account will inspire future journalists, especially women, and should find wide audiences among those interested in global crises and international affairs. See Marwan Hisham and Molly Crabapple's Brothers of the Gun for another work about a reporter unafraid of writing truth to power. [See Prepub Alert, 6/10/18]-Karl Helicher, formerly with Upper -Merion Twp. Lib., King of Prussia, PA © Copyright 2018. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Table of Contents
| Preface | p. xiii |
| Part I America | |
| 1 Dead Man's Branch | p. 3 |
| 2 Father and Daughter | p. 26 |
| 3 Lovers and Mentors | p. 51 |
| Part II Middle East | |
| 4 The Path of Death | p. 81 |
| 5 In a Man's World | p. 109 |
| 6 War, Peace, and Love | p. 138 |
| Part III The World Beyond | |
| 7 We're Gonna Make You a Star | p. 167 |
| 8 Leap Before You Look | p. 196 |
| 9 The Face in the Mirror | p. 229 |
| Part IV London | |
| 10 All at Sea | p. 261 |
| 11 A Reckless Tide | p. 290 |
| 12 Baba Amr | p. 319 |
| Epilogue | p. 345 |
| "Reports of my Survival may be Exaggerated," | p. 355 |
| Sources and Acknowledgments | p. 357 |
| Index | p. 361 |