Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

The recipient of multiple Peabody and Murrow awards, Clarissa Ward is a world-renowned conflict reporter. In this strange age of crisis where there really is no front line, she has moved from one hot zone to the next. With multiple assignments in Syria, Egypt, and Afghanistan, Ward, who speaks seven languages, has been based in Baghdad, Beirut, Beijing, and Moscow. She has seen and documented the violent remaking of the world at close range. With her deep empathy, Ward finds a way to tell the hardest stories. On All Fronts is the riveting account of Ward's singular career and of journalism in this age of extremism.

Excerpt provided by Syndetics

I looked down at the swell of mourners moving toward me. A coffin was held aloft, touched and blessed by a thousand hands as it swayed down the street. The men carrying it were sweating despite the cool afternoon, pressed in on all sides by chanting protestors. Some of them had caught sight of me and my camera as I had tried to catch up with the cortege and they cleared the way. They wanted their story of resistance told. I struggled through the crowd and jumped onto a flatbed truck a few yards ahead of the coffin, which was draped with the flag of the Syrian revolution (three red stars rather than the two green stars of the official flag)."I can't screw up this shot, I can't screw up this shot," I whispered to myself. Lying in the coffin was a sixteen-year-old boy who had been shot by Syrian security forces the day before. He had become the latest martyr of the rapidly growing uprising against the regime of Syrian president Bashar al-Assad. I took a deep breath and balanced the small point-and-shoot tourism camera on top of the cab of the truck, willing my hands to stay completely still as the coffin approached. I could see the face of the dead boy now, smooth and gray, his eyes closed, his lips parted a fraction. And then he was gone, carried off on the wave of angry mourners. I was on my own in Damascus on my first assignment as a correspondent for CBS News. As a dual citizen with a UK passport, I had managed to obtain a tourist visa, but my producer had not. And I had no camera- man. I had little experience shooting video and did not underestimate the risks of embarking on such an assignment. A journalist traveling alone could easily be disappeared. But I'd been to Syria many times before, spoke enough Arabic to get around on my own, and was desperate to cover the fast-expanding Syrian uprising, which was reaching a boiling point by that fall of 2011. Opposition activists had brought me to the sprawling suburb of Douma to cover the funeral. I had been in Damascus for a few days before I had managed to slip away from my hotel and the ever-present secret police to link up with them. Hundreds of people now poured in from all directions. The women marched together at the back of the procession. Rows and rows of them waved banners with slogans demanding justice and the overthrow of the regime of Bashar al-Assad. Someone started beating a drum, and the crowd hoisted a boy onto a man's shoulders so that he could lead the chant. "Oh, Bashar, you liar," he chanted, "to hell with you and your speech. Freedom is at the door." " Yalla irhal, ya Bashar ," the crowd chanted, clapping rhythmically. "Get out, Bashar!" The chant had become the anthem of the revolution, a revolution gathering strength in the suburbs of Damascus and in Homs and in Hama--and posing a genuine threat to Assad's rule. I looked over the sea of people, cheering and chanting, hands with cell phones raised in the air to capture the protest and beam it out on social media. The crisp November air crackled with the energy and excitement of their voices. Emboldened by their own daring, they grew louder and louder, the clapping thunderous. My foot tapped along with the beat. It was electrifying. "Bashar, screw you and screw those who salute you."These protesters had been waiting for their moment since the Arab Spring unfolded earlier that year--knocking over decades-old dictator- ships in Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya. At the time, Assad had told the Wall Street Journal : "This is the Middle East, where every week you have something new." But he had confidently predicted that the maelstrom would not affect his country. Instead, it would spur reform. He would turn out to be spectacularly wrong on both counts. On March 6, 2011, a group of teenage boys, inspired by the wave of protests spreading across the region, had been arrested for spray-painting As‑Sha'ab yurid isqat an‑nizam! (The people want the downfall of the regime!) on walls in Dara'a, a rundown farming town near the Jordanian border. It was the rallying cry of the revolutions in Egypt and Libya and it brought swift retaliation from local security forces. When the boys were released two weeks later, alive but brutalized, their angry families marched on the governor's house to demand justice. They were met with a hail of bullets. Three protesters were killed. And an uprising was born. By now a pattern had emerged. The funeral of someone murdered by the regime would then turn into a protest against the regime. Security forces would flood in and open fire, and then the next day there would be an even larger funeral. By that November, there were dozens of such fu- nerals across Syria every day. I watched the crowd as they chanted " hurriya, hurriya " (freedom, freedom) over and over. They waved banners calling for a no-fly zone to prevent Assad from murdering his people. They had seen Western jets save Libyans in Benghazi from Qaddafi's advancing forces months earlier and they believed that the West would do the same for them. How bitterly disappointed they would be. In that moment, though, I felt giddy with a mixture of excitement and fear. Rallies like these were often targeted by pro-Assad militias, infa- mous for their thuggish cruelty. Known as shabiha, derived from the Ara- bic word for ghosts, these men wore street clothes and seemingly appeared out of thin air. People lived in fear of them, not just because of the brutal beatings they administered, but because they acted as informants, telling the regime which families were involved with the protest movement. Un- like the military, you never knew if the shabiha were there or not. Under these circumstances, talking to a Western reporter could be a death sentence. And yet here in Douma, as soon as people saw that I was a journalist, they wanted to tell their story. I marveled at their bravery. One man had stopped me in the street as I walked past with my camera. He spoke some English and so I stopped to record an interview. "Please," he implored, "this is the real Syria." His voice quivered with emotion. "If you come you will see real bodies. They are not stones, they are not toys. They are real bodies." A group ushered me over to the small graveyard designated for those who had been killed in the uprising. They were called shuhada , or martyrs, and there were about sixty of them buried in neat rows. A photograph of a young boy smiled out from one of the headstones. I thought of the man's words--"they are not toys." Each shaheed (singular for martyr) left behind the grieving. The day before the funeral, I had been introduced to a tailor who sat on a stool and wept quietly, his eyes fixed on the ground, as he told me about his son's death. He spoke so softly that I strained to hear the details. His son had attended a protest at his university. Security forces arrived. Bullets were fired. His son . . . He stopped speaking and his body shook softly with sobs. I watched his hands, fidgeting constantly with fear and grief. I wanted to take them in mine and hold them, to put down the camera for a minute and be a human being. But I knew the only way I could help him was to make sure that people heard his story. I prompted him to keep going, " Wa ba'dayn ? And then?" His son was shot in the stomach on the university steps, he went on. The hospital didn't want to treat him because they feared punishment from government forces. He bled to death. The man's voice cracked. It was excruciating but I held the shot, held the pause as he wiped his eyes.   It had taken me weeks of research and Skype calls to connect with the Syrian opposition, which by the end of 2011 was being relent- lessly harried by the regime. Many activists had already been thrown in jails or simply disappeared; stories of terrible abuse and torture were be- ginning to circulate.For the first few days I had played the role of tourist, which is what my visa insisted I must be. Then, one morning, I had put on a headscarf, or hijab , and slipped out of the hotel--away from the watchful gaze of the chain-smoking secret policemen. With my blonde hair hidden away, I was suddenly invisible. The difference from the previous days, when everyone seemed to be staring at me, this foreigner, was incredible. I would often wear the hijab on subsequent assignments in Syria. From a security stance, it lowered my profile significantly. But it also allowed me to stand on the sidelines quietly and take in a scene as it was unfolding instead of be- coming its focus. It's never easy as a television reporter, because carrying a camera inevitably attracts attention. Anything I could do to minimize the distraction of my presence was a plus. I was careful to ensure I wasn't being followed as I meandered through the streets of the Syrian capital on my way to meet an activist called Hussein. We had been introduced through another Syrian activist online who acted as a coordinator in Damascus. The night before we had stayed up late on Skype, discussing where and when to meet. I agreed I would come and find him at Bab Touma, one of the seven entrances to the old city, the following morning at eight o'clock. For the next five days, I would stay with him. Hussein's face was round and smiling, with a permanent five-o'clock shadow, and he wore the same sweatpants and plastic sandals every day. He looked like a college student who had pulled one too many all-nighters. He shared his small courtyard house in the old city with a litter of white kittens that climbed over him as we chatted and kneaded their paws on the sofas noisily. Like many of the activists I would meet that week, Hussein was giddy with the excitement of being part of a revolution. In the evenings, he would take me to meet up with his friends in their apartments. For the most part, they were educated and urbane, a mix of Sunni Muslims, Christians, and Alawites. Later on, the uprising would take on a distinctly Islamist hue, but these were the heady early days that burned with ideal- ism. I would sit with them and watch as they smoked cigarette after ciga- rette and talked late into the night about what their revolution would look like. They spoke with passion about freedom and democracy and human rights and yet, even then, you could sense that they had little understand- ing of or exposure to the foundations and institutions needed to build and nurture these ideals. Hussein introduced me to Razan Zaitouneh, a central figure in the protest movement. She was pale and tall and slim with long, wavy, mouse- colored hair and watery blue eyes and a gap between her front teeth. She chain-smoked when she talked and she rarely smiled. Razan was in a dif- ferent league from Hussein and his friends. She was a human rights lawyer and had been an activist in Syria for years before the Arab Spring began. She spoke with a blunt confidence and she was savvy enough to know how real the risks were. The Syrian regime had been tracking her move- ments for some time and she was now living in hiding to avoid arrest. "Are you scared?" I asked her one day as we drank tea together in Hussein's apartment. "Who is not?" she replied matter-of-factly, taking a deep drag of her cigarette. She stroked one of the kittens absentmindedly as she talked. "But we have to continue. We decided to start our revolution. This is what we have been dreaming of from a long time ago." She looked up at me as she stubbed her cigarette out. " Yalla [Come on], let's go." Razan and Hussein had taken me to the funeral in Douma and to the protests that were becoming more and more common on Fridays, the Muslim holy day. Often, the demonstrations would begin seemingly out of nowhere, like a flash mob. A chant would start and a crowd would form, only to melt away again just as quickly, their point made: "We are here and we won't be cowed." One afternoon, they took me to meet a network of doctors who set up underground field clinics to treat those wounded in the protests. We climbed through a hidden passage in the wall that led to a stockpile of medical equipment. Bandages, antibiotics, syringes, and, most ominously, skin staplers. The courage and determination of the opposition, which at this stage eschewed violence despite the brutality meted out by the regime, were in- spiring. At a demonstration late one night in a Damascus suburb, two young women, their faces covered, sidled up next to me and handed me a note. The handwriting was neat and childish. They had drawn the flag of the Syrian revolution in ballpoint pen at the top left-hand corner of the paper. It said simply, "We don't shed tears for the martyrs, we shed tears for the cowards." Still, by the end of 2011, protest was starting to give way to resistance, and an armed insurgency was beginning to form. Force could only be met by force. At the funeral in Douma, a man had come up to me carry- ing a sign. It said: "The Free Syrian Army represents and protects me." The Free Syrian Army, known as the FSA, had formed in July and was made up mostly of Syrian soldiers who had defected after refusing orders to fire on the people. Razan and Hussein had differing views about the inception of the FSA. Hussein emphasized that the militia's only role was to form a perim- eter around the rallies and protect the people: "I guess it's some kind of necessary right now." Razan was much more skeptical, concerned that the group would fundamentally change the spirit of their nonviolent movement. Her concerns turned out to be prophetic. It was the beginning of the militarization of the conflict, one that Bashar al-Assad welcomed. He liked to claim that Syrians and the out- side world had a binary choice: him or terrorism. And in a move of cal- lous calculation, that spring he had released thousands of imprisoned jihadis--they would graft themselves onto the insurgency and eventu- ally consume it. Late one night, Hussein offered to arrange for me to meet members of the Free Syrian Army. While some FSA fighters had been interviewed in Homs, none had done an on-camera interview with a Western journal- ist in Damascus--largely because very few foreign journalists had man- aged to get into Damascus, with the exception of a handful of Europeans who had visas from the regime. But they had minders assigned to watch their every move and weren't able to get near the protests. I knew I had a singular opportunity--and I wanted to see how real this armed resistance was. Hussein drove me back to Douma, and from there I got into another car with a man who apologized before blindfolding me. He explained that he had to make sure I didn't know the location of the safe house where the interview would take place. Hussein was not allowed to come with me. I willed myself not to panic as the car twisted along winding back roads. I had no idea where we were going. After about twenty minutes, we stopped, and the cool air rushed to my face as the car door opened. Some- one helped guide me inside a house, where my blindfold was removed. Standing before me were about a dozen men in military fatigues, carry- ing AK-47s and RPGs (rocket propelled grenades), their faces covered by checkered scarves known as keffiyehs . My mouth felt dry. I was all too aware of how much of a target they were--and I half expected a bunch of Syrian military commandos to come bursting through the door at any minute, guns blazing. I cleared my throat and introduced myself while trying to work out how I was going to shoot this interview. The frame needed to be wide enough to get all the men in it as well as me. How I wished for a camera- man and a tripod. In the end, I gave the camera to the man who had driven me there, and he balanced it on a pile of books on a side table. This would not be a beautifully produced piece of television. "We are fighting those who made our children orphans and our wives widows," the commander began. I asked if he wasn't concerned that by militarizing the conflict, more people were going to get hurt. "We didn't choose to go to war," he said. "It was imposed upon us to protect our people and our honor." He sounded stiff and formal. The commander claimed that his men had carried out attacks on military tar- gets around the capital, the heart of Assad's power base, seizing weapons along the way. I couldn't get a sense of how this contingent of men fit into the hi- erarchy of the FSA, which was an early clue that there wasn't really a coherent structure to the organization. Any group could make a banner and upload videos to YouTube, declaring themselves members of the Free Syrian Army--but it didn't mean there was communication and coordi- nation between the groups. The Islamist movements that would eventu- ally subsume the insurgency were more disciplined, more ruthless. As we were finishing the interview, one of the fighters beckoned me over. He was holding up a passport-sized photo of a smiling little boy with chubby cheeks and curly brown hair, his son. "This is what we are fighting for," he told me with an air of urgency. "So that he can have a better future." His eyes bored directly into mine, as if to say, "Do you get it now? Do you understand?" I nodded slowly. His sincerity was obvious. But it was also clear that the fighters didn't have a real strategy and they were up against an unrelenting enemy. After a week in Damascus, I wanted to try to get to Homs, where the crackdown had been at its most brutal. I messaged my bosses in New York. "No," came the immediate reply. "It sounds like you have great stuff, don't push your luck." It's easy, as a journalist, to spend time in a dangerous place and be- come desensitized to the risks, to want more, to never think that what you have is enough. You rely on experienced colleagues who can check your ambitions. I remember the great CBS reporter Allen Pizzey quoting an editor with the Reuters news agency in Africa who would summon his reporters back from the front lines of far-flung war zones with a simple telegram: "Cannot file if dead." In addition to the lure of a better story, in those early days of the Arab Spring there was also a hope that a better reality was actually possible. That change was within reach. I hoped that my work could in a small way aid that cause, but in Syria I would come to realize that the idea of "making a difference" in journalism is as seductive as it is dangerous. It encourages hubris and shifts the focus from the actual job. The reality is we are not there to solve the problem, we are there to illuminate it. On my last night in Damascus, a blackout blanketed the city, one of many small signs that all was not well in the capital. Hussein and Razan and I sat in the darkness in his living room, the glow of Razan's cigarette lighting up her face a little when she took a drag. I thought back to that morning when I had asked her if she had a message for Bashar al-Assad. "Leave!" she said simply. "Leave now because you know that you will leave at the end but with more victims, with more suffering of the people. So just leave and leave us to start our new future, our new country. You got enough of our blood." But Assad didn't leave. And within two years of that trip to Damascus, Hussein would be imprisoned and Razan would be kidnapped by armed men. Neither have been heard from since. Excerpted from On All Fronts: The Education of a Journalist by Clarissa Ward All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.

Reviews provided by Syndetics

Library Journal Review

The 9/11 attack on the World Trade Center inspired all kinds of responses among American citizens. Ward (chief international correspondent, CNN) saw a world in which misunderstanding resulted in violence and tragedy, thus commiting to journalism as a path to generating compassion across cultures. With a degree in Russian literature and no journalism experience, she launched her career with an unpaid internship at CNN in Moscow. Ward documents her growth as an award-winning journalist covering conflicts in Syria, Afghanistan, and Egypt. In her 15-year career, she reported for Fox, CBS, and ABC, winning five Emmys and two Murrow Awards. Here she intertwines her investigative and embedded reporting with her personal life--getting married and giving birth to a son--and acknowledges the personal toll of writing about such brutal events. VERDICT Ward's journalism skills shine, putting readers on the front lines. Readers interested in the life stories of intrepid women journalists and the nature of investigative, international journalism will be captivated by this engrossing account.--Judy Solberg, Sacramento, CA

Publishers Weekly Review

Ward, CNN's chief international correspondent, recounts her life in journalism in this insightful memoir. Ward grew up in a well-to-do family in New York City and London and attended Yale; after watching the 9/11 attacks on TV, she found a "sense of purpose and clarity" and knew she "had to go to the front lines." Her career began as a desk assistant for Fox in 2003, from there she worked for CBS, ABC, and finally CNN, where she focused heavily on the Middle East. She conducted much of her reporting covertly and during combat, and she details her often harrowing experiences that eventually took a toll on her physical and mental well-being. She survived the 2005 attack on the Fox headquarters in Baghdad; escaped a violent crowd of Han Chinese, who, after beating a group of Uighur men, turned to the reporters present; and smuggled memory cards containing images of the Arab Spring protests out of Syria in her underwear. But it's the connections she made with the civilians that really tell the story of these war-torn regions and demonstrate an empathy that makes Ward's work so accessible, as when she sings to a room of Muslim women during a heavy shelling attack. Along the way, Ward shares some anecdotes such as meeting Quentin Tarantino as a stand-in on the set of Kill Bill, and meeting Muammar Gaddafi's son Saif at a dinner party in Moscow in 2007. Ward surprises in this affecting insider view of international reporting. (Apr.)

Kirkus Book Review

A London-based foreign correspondent looks back on a career covering life in war zones.Now chief international correspondent for CNN, Ward, who has won an Emmy and two Peabody Awards, was the only child of a wealthy American mother and a British investment banker father who separated when she was young. Raised first in New York and then in London, the author studied comparative literature at Yale until 9/11 inspired her to seek a career in journalism. Beginning with an overnight desk assistant's job at Fox News, where she experienced the "pervasive sexism" others have reported there, she worked her way up in journalism, adding Arabic to the five languages she already knew. Along the way, she spent time in Moscow, Baghdad, and Beirut, sometimes embedded with troops and sometimes hanging out in hotels with other journalists waiting for a story to break. Her descriptions of her experiences at all the sites are vivid and precise. Among the assignments that clearly meant the most to Ward were her several stints in Syria, where several sources to whom she became close disappeared, leaving her both bereft and conscious of her own privilege as a foreign journalist able to leave the country. Even more than her other jobs, the time in Syria taught her that "the idea of 'making a difference' in journalism is as seductive as it is dangerous.The reality is that we are not there to solve the problem, we are there to illuminate it." Although Ward focuses more on her assignments than her inner life, it's obvious that as her time on the job continued, she suffered physical and emotional tolls, and the risk of "burning out amid one high-pressure trip after another" became higher. At the end of the book, she writes about how, after a brief respite for a marriage and the birth of a baby following a pregnancy that placed her at risk of contracting malaria in Bangladesh, she was back in the field in Afghanistan.A thoughtful account of the excitement and pitfalls of war reporting. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.