Its a miracle!
Kate Adie - The Kindness of Strangers
Lets begin by saying, Take some time, and read this book.
Pertinent, relevant, and fully engaging.
Kate Adie, seems to live a life a little like a butterfly in a Hurricane. Constantly thrown around by external forces ( The BBC and War). We see Kate travel across the globe, flitting from war torn crisis to war torn crisis. Constantly fleeing from death, bombs, snipers, crazy military and coup's... and generally everything. Oh, and drinking wine...
Having watched various news reports you get a snap shot of a crisis, and a few pictures.. you a get a feel that war is pretty much organised and fits into neat sound bites.
Kate's autobiography largely gives you the feeling that its a miracle that any news reports actually happen, and that more news reporters don't get killed in action. Chaos..
Kate also constantly underplays her own role in these events... Anyone made of less stern stuff would have legged it very early on in her career... Just having the commitment to voluntarily stay in these war zones, and tell these stories is frankly amazing.
I watched the news tonight - and was left wondering about the back story. What didn't we see? That is what the Kate Adie book has left me with. What can't we be shown? Not due to censorship - but due to time constraints, or editorial policy. And thinking a little more is never a bad thing...
Now, was it a good book... Hmmmm... has taken me a long time to read - a very long time, and has been quite hard work. This is despite the subject matter being fascinated.
What I struggled with was the sense of story.. There was no obvious narrative journey. Each of the events, and there were hundreds of stories - all jumble together to form a morass. Kate does seem to live her life like a butterfly in a hurricane, and in my opinion writes the same way.
Worth a read, very worth the time, just a little tougher than I expected.
