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No Ordinary Assignment
No Ordinary Assignment: A Memoir | Jane Ferguson
2 posts | 2 read | 4 to read
"A haunting memoir of disarming honesty. . . a remarkable testament to the anguish and the beauty of foreign correspondence.Roger Cohen, New York Times Paris bureau chief and author of An Affirming Flame From award-winning journalist Jane Ferguson, an unflinching memoir of ambition and warfrom The Troubles to the fall of Kabul. Jane Ferguson has covered nearly every war front and humanitarian crisis of our time. She reported from Yemen as protests grew into the Arab Spring; she secured rare access to rebel-held Syria, where foreign journalists were banned, to cover its civil war. When the Taliban claimed Kabul in 2021, she was one of the last Western journalists to remain at the airport as thousands of Afghans, including some of her colleagues, struggled to evacuate. Living with sectarian violence was nothing new to Ferguson. As a child in Northern Ireland in the 1980s and 90s, The Troubles meant bomb threats and military checkpoints on the way to school were commonplace. Books by Dervla Murphy and Martha Gellhorn offered solace from her turbulent family, and an opportunity to study Arabic in Yemen came as a reliefand a ticket to the life in journalism she imagined. Without family wealth or connections, she began as a scrappy one-woman reporting team, a borrowed camera often her only equipment. Networks told her she had the wrong accent, the wrong appearance, not enough bang-bang shoot-em-up. Still, Ferguson threw herself into harms way time and again, determined to give voice to civilian experiences of war. In the face of grave violence and suffering, this seemed a small act of justice, no matter the risks. Fergusons bold debut chronicles her unlikely journey from bright, inquisitive child to intrepid war correspondent. With an open-hearted humanity we rarely see in conflict stories, No Ordinary Assignment shows what it means to build an authentic career against the odds.
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Floresj
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I love foreign journalists‘ memoirs and this one is fantastic. Readable, vulnerable, intense and informative, Ferguson showcases her life‘s work in Yemen, Afghanistan, Syria, Iraq- the beauty, the people and the tragedy. She has more courage than I could muster, and it makes me be reminded of how much to appreciate those who tell the stories of civilians in war.

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Megabooks
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In this interesting memoir, Ferguson shares stories from her time as a war reporter in the Middle East and Afghanistan. She shares the difficulties of breaking in as a freelance reporter in Yemen and her award winning coverage of the US withdrawal from Afghanistan for PBS. Her unstable home life and childhood during the Troubles in Northern Ireland gave her the fortitude to risk it all grabbing for each rung of her career. Great reflections!

Cinfhen Excellent review 🫶🏼 1y
Megabooks @Cinfhen thanks dear friend! 🥰😘 1y
BarbaraBB Interesting!! 1y
See All 8 Comments
Chelsea.Poole Ohh thanks for the tag! I haven‘t heard of this one. Stacking 😊 1y
Megabooks @Cinfhen this may be another one to consider in addition to the ones I mentioned in my email. 💜 1y
Megabooks @Cinfhen two more to think about nonfiction wise are 1y
Cinfhen Thanks SO MUCH!!! You‘re still my go to!!! 1y
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