Reporting that made a difference

What I’m Reading

Today, we begin a new feature in Life Sentences. For about a decade straddling the turn of the last century, I was the literary editor at The Montreal Gazette, each week putting together the Books Section, as it was called. This gave me a taste for reading about what informed people – writers, critics, pundits and experts – had to say about books the paper reviewed. Sometimes people asked me: “Do you read all those books?” “No, I couldn’t possibly,” I said. “Hundreds cross my desk, but I do want to know what some of them are about and whether I might want to read them.”

The passion for learning about books as much as reading them has stuck with me, and I still look for reviews in various places. Alas, book reviewing in mainstream media seems in decline. But What I’m Reading, the rubric I’m using for this venture, aims to provide at least a rivulet in the direction of bringing books to people. The reviews will be relatively short – nobody wants the glazed-over eyeballs that can happen with an online format. And posts will be by writers who know how to get inside a book.

We begin with Barbara Black, who wrote the Paperbacks column in The Gazette’s Book Section. These were thumbnail-length reviews in which Barbara distilled the essence of a book into a paragraph or two. I’ve always admired a writer’s ability to offer her words sparingly with wit and effect as Barbara does here.

– Bryan Demchinsky

Birhan Woldu at 3 when Stewart found her, and later after she recovered, with her father and Stewart (AP, Simon & Schuster)

On the Ground: My Life as a Foreign Correspondent

By Brian Stewart

Simon & Schuster, $37.99

This memoir begins with a personal story that shrank a global disaster down to imaginable size.

Brian Stewart was appalled when he covered the Ethiopian famine of the mid-1980s for the CBC. In a refugee camp he was fascinated by a tiny girl who appeared to be dying of hunger. Stewart brought her story and her pitiful photo to international attention, which resulted in the pop-music fundraiser Live Aid. Unexpectedly, the child was saved, and years later he found her and her family. Many of us will remember their reunion, which was shown on television. Stewart quietly gave them financial support for many years.

What a pleasure it is to read this well-written account of his extraordinary career by my former colleague at the CBC. He set out at an early age to become a foreign correspondent, studying politics and playing board games of strategy. He focused on jobs that would take him to the heart of global action. He was galvanized by the adrenaline, though he was often shaking in his combat boots. It fed his curiosity, his concern for the victims of circumstance, his love of history and his writing ability.

Brian and I worked together in about 1970 as co-hosts of the local CBC’s weekday public affairs show Hourglass, but he didn’t stay long. I remember how uncomfortable he was in the studio. From this book I learned that he was dosing himself with vodka and Valium. His friends were the bohemian bon vivant Nick Auf der Maur, the Montreal city councillor, and the confident patrician Conrad Black, but I remember him as a serious fellow whose politics were more analytical than ideological.

For many years he was unmarried, and the rootlessness got to him. He hints at a spiritual search, but that seems not to have been resolved. The years of observing suffering and dodging mortars led to a breakdown in his fifties; ever resourceful, he joined a medical study on the physical and mental effects of foreign reporting. I’m glad he finally married, and happily. He and journalist Tina Srebotnjak have a daughter, who is a psychologist.

Most of this book describes war theatres, famines and high-octane political interviews. There is so much geopolitics that it risks overwhelming the reader with detail. It will be a handy resource for anyone wanting to know which crisis followed which from the 1970s to 2010, and it may serve as inspiration — or as a cautionary tale — for youngsters who want to take up this demanding career.

Scrambling to cover what media were calling “The Worst Hell on Earth” – the great Ethiopian Famine in 1984. Millions were uprooted, over one million died. (Simon & Schuster)

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