Reporter

'Reporter is just wonderful. Truly a great life, and what shines out of the book, amid the low cunning and tireless legwork, is Hersh's warmth and humanity. Essential reading for every journalist and aspiring journalist the world over' John le Carré

In the early 1950s, teenage Seymour Hersh was finishing high school anduniversity - while running the family's struggling dry cleaning store ina Southside Chicago ghetto. Today, he is one of America's premierinvestigative journalists, whose fearless reporting has earned him fame,front-page bylines in virtually every newspaper in the world, astaggering collection of awards, and no small amount of controversy.

Reporteris the story of how he did it. It is a story of slog, ingenuity anddefiance, following Hersh from his first job as a crime reporter for theChicago City News Bureau, through his Pulitzer Prize-winning freelanceinvestigative exposes, to the heights of his reporting for The New York Times and the New Yorker.It is a tale of night-time encounters with great Civil Rights leaders,unauthorised meetings with Pentagon officials, raucous dinners withCanadian soldiers in Hanoi, tense phone calls with Secretaries of State,desperate to save face; of exposing myriad military and politicalwrongdoing, from My Lai to Watergate to Abu Ghraib, and the cynicalcover-ups that followed in Washington and New York. Here too areunforgettable encounters with some of the most formidable figures fromrecent decades, from Saul Bellow to Martin Luther King Jr., from HenryKissinger to Bashar al-Assad.

Ultimately, in unfurling Seymour Hersh's life and career, Reporter tells a story of twentieth-century America, in all its excitement and darkness.

Reviews

Reporter is just wonderful. Truly a great life, and what shines out of the book, amid the low cunning and tireless legwork, is Hersh's warmth and humanity. Essential reading for every journalist and aspiring journalist the world over