It’s What I Do by Lynsey Addario

“I was willing to die for stories that had the potential to educate people. I wanted to make people think, to open their minds, to give them a full picture of what was happening”

It’s What I Do is Lynsey Addario’s memoir of her growth as a photographer, her journey to photojournalism, and her countless experiences covering conflict, human rights violations and suffering around the world. She’s known best for her work with the New York Times (including the Pulitzer prize-winning “Talibanistan” series, photo essays covering conflicts and stories in Iraq, Sudan, the DRC, Pakistan, Libya and Daily Live in Syria’s Civil War), National Geographic, Time, New York Times Magazine, and much more.

Lynsey tells the story of her career, her uncompromised dedication and perseverance of photojournalism and how this has shaped her life. She has borne witness to the front lines of many incredible historic moments including her time as an embed with the US military in Afghanistan, coverage of the Libyan civil war, Darfur, Gaza, and her tenacity to continue pushing to the front lines. Robert Capa once said, “If your pictures aren’t good enough, you’re not close enough” and she adopts this approach in astonishing ways. This is the same conviction that pushes her into Mogadishu – kidnapping capital of the world  – while pregnant to gain a full picture of Somalia’s drought.  It’s also, in part, what compelled her to go to Afghanistan while still under Taliban rule to capture a sense of what it was like to be a woman under the Taliban… even though photographing any living thing was illegal and punishable by death under the Taliban. She believes she has a real duty to war correspondence, informing policymakers and the public.

Her story starts with her childhood in Connecticut. An adolescence she coincidentally shared with Tyler Hicks, also a famous photojournalist who she found herself held captive alongside during the 2011 Libyan civil war. (He also recently won the Pulitzer for his photos from the Westgate Mall terror attack).

After college, Addario saved waitressing money in order to move to Argentina where she found her first paying job as a photographer at $10 a picture. She was influenced early on by Sebastião Salgado, a Brazilian photojournalist, and experienced a kind of epiphany at one of his exhibitions that wedded her love of photography, international relations and human rights reportage: photojournalism. Her life moves to India, Mexico City, Istanbul, New Delhi and her work takes her everywhere. Even motherhood doesn’t stop her from pursuing stories in Senegal, Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan, Kenya, Somalia, Gaza.

She’s been in the line of fire, kidnapped in Iraq, held prisoner in Libya, threatened, sexually assaulted, regularly underestimated… but her insistence on fulfilling her life mission despite anyone’s expectations that she lead a normal, safe life is brave rather than reckless.

Her story is bookended by her experience in Libya when covering a story on the Libyan rebels in the eastern town of Aidabiya. Colonel Gaddafi’s soldiers capture her and three other New York Times reporters before they’re able to escape and their ordeal is beyond horrifying. One of her captors lightly touches her face and hair speaking softly in a way that she assumes is comforting until a fellow captive who speaks Arabic translates: “He’s telling you that you will die tonight.”

Word is that Warner Bros has already optioned the book to turn it into a movie…

This was recommended to me by Jane and read in a continuous, 36-hour spellbind.

Photocredit: Lynsey Addario / Getty Images Reportage

Burmese Days by George Orwell

“In Burma today, there is a joke that Orwell didn’t write just one novel about the country, but three; a trilogy comprised of Burmese Days, Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four.” – Emma Larkin

Burmese Days is a fictionalised story about the British Raj in the made-up district of Kyauktada, though was heavily influenced by Orwell’s own time in Burma. This, his first novel, was banned from publication in the UK because it was felt to be full of unambiguous lampoons of British rule as well as some of the “old Burma hands” that Orwell met while stationed abroad.

Much of the story reads like satire as it’s very focused around the British club and its members who are absurd and unsophisticated but also vulgar and racist. In comparison, Flory, the main character is seen to be a ‘high brow’ Socialist as he is friendly with the natives and more sensitive to the local opinions of the British, but ultimately fails to be noble, loyal, or even notably different from the other club members.

This is a cheerless and intensely atmospheric story; it picks up eight embittered, lonely years into Flory’s station when he’s deep in the trenches of emotional isolation, heavy drinking, sweltering heat, and self-hatred. His years have slipped by and he seems to be incredulous at his life’s dashed hopes and possibilities. He’s painfully aware that he’s no longer a young man, and profoundly ashamed of his position and his weaknesses. There’s a twofold sense of the enormity of every action and interaction that plays out in this small, dusty village as well as the complete insignificance of it all that is disillusioning and disorienting.

Flory bears a striking resemblance to Orwell with the notable exception of an almost leech-like birthmark, which is mentioned so exhaustively it can almost be considered a character unto itself. Whether the birthmark is a metaphor for the stain of British imperialism on the Indian subcontinent or a method for accentuating skin colour, it does surface throughout.

It definitely reads like a first novel.

Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief

Going Clear is broken into three major sections: Scientology, which focuses on L. Ron Hubbard, the origins of the cult (some say “religion”), the farcical tales Scientology is predicated upon, as well as the original offenses of the church. The book then moves onto the courting of Hollywood – particularly focused on the “church’s putative savior”: Tom Cruise. This section goes into some very disturbing territory in terms of how entangled the church becomes in the PR of its highest profile members and the control it enforces on – for example – eliminating potential ‘Suppressive Persons’ or S.P.s from the lives of its most coveted members. The final section, the ‘Prison of Belief,’ details the abuses of the church in further detail and makes it clear just how brave an undertaking this book was.

This is an astounding piece of journalism – the depth of detail, the access that Wright manages to gain to obscure accounts of former church members, and the fully evidence-backed expose of the Church of Scientology is both exceptional and courageous.

After reading this, I went back to an article I remember reading in Vanity Fair shortly after the break-up of Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes. Albeit quite long, this article rapidly covers much of the ground that Going Clear does in far more detail – especially the meddling involvement the church has had in Tom Cruise’s relationships.

Photo credit: Alo Ceballos/Filmmagic (Holmes); by Barnaby Hall/Getty Images (Man).

I managed to notate 25 bookmarks throughout my copy of Going Clear and as much as I would love to reiterate all. the. facts!, I’ll pick five favorites. Suffice it to say, this one is definitely worth reading.

1.    Scientology purports that the planet Earth, formerly called Teegeeack was part of a confederation of planets under the leadership of a despotic ruler named Xenu. Those ruled by Xenu, the Loyal Officers, decided their leader was wicked and decided to try to remove him. Instead, Xenu’s troops destroyed the officers by shooting a needle into their lung and injecting a mixture of frozen alcohol and glycol. The bodies were frozen, packed away onto space planes and thus billions of ‘thetans’ (free floating souls) were transported to Teegeeack (Earth), dropped into volcanoes and blown up with hydrogen bombs. Xenu didn’t realize that thetans are immortal – the souls of people who have now been dead for 75 million years – and in present day they attach themselves to living people. “Auditing,” or the very expensive process of going clear aims to eliminate the body of these squatting thetans, who cramp the way for spiritual progression.
2.    Because of the above, L. Ron Hubbard argues that everyone has past lives. An absurd example: he claims that in another life he was a contemporary of Machiavelli and that he stole his line, “The end justifies the means” for the Prince.
3.    When L. Ron Hubbard was looking to evade the British, American and Soviet governments prying investigations, he decided to go to …. Rhodesia to try to take it over. He really identified with Cecil John Rhodes (his flamboyance and red hair, obviously) and even thought he might have been Rhodes in a previous life.
4.    The Citizens Commission on Human Rights, a lobby group invented by the Church of Scientology, has managed to argue that psychiatry was responsible for the Holocaust, apartheid and 9/11 and that no mental diseases have ever been proven to exist.
5.    The church ran a domestic espionage mission without compare called Operation Snow White, which I’ll leave you to read about in your own time. Enjoy!