What journalism once was

Foreign Correspondent: A Memoir by H.D.S. Greenway (Simon & Schuster, $26).

Boston Globe journalist H.D.S. Greenway has covered a lot of ground, including Southeast Asia, the Middle East and Afghanistan. This memoir includes his upbringing in Boston, but the meat of the story begins with his arrival in Vietnam in 1967—just in time for some of the biggest stories of a generation.

Greenway covered the fall of Phnom Penh and the triumph of the Khmer Rouge, the bombing of Cambodia, and the fall of Saigon. That’s a lot of eyes-and-ears reporting from a time and place most of us know only from iconic images—the choppers being rolled off the carriers, for instance, to make room on deck—and he offers the sort of thick description only an eyewitness can provide, from a more personal perspective than his reporting at the time.

Working for the Washington Post, Greenway became their bureau chief in Israel, and then later, for the Globe, he reported on the fall of the Soviet Union.

With a resume like that, you’d expect some insightful writing about recent world history, and this memoir doesn’t disappoint, with lush descriptions of life during wartime and insightful commentary on U.S. foreign policy.

Given the way that news media is cutting back on foreign journalists, it—unfortunately—takes a book like this to remind us of what we’re losing.

Reviewed on Lit/Rant: www.litrant.tumblr.com ( )