Clarissa Ward

On All Fronts – The Education of a Journalist

This is the memoir of award-winning British-American television journalist Clarissa Ward, who has been reporting from crisis-stricken countries such as Syria, Egypt, and Afghanistan for years. Besides stories about her harrowing experiences in war zones, she also reflects on personal topics such as the effects of her job on her mental well-being and the change her role as a mother brought. I especially love her recollection of memories with the civilians affected by conflict.

“That didn’t mean that some wars weren’t worth fighting. It just meant that the goals needed to be more specific and perhaps less idealistic, grounded in the reality of how parts of the world see us and not just the ideal of how we see ourselves.

I understood that in a sense I had failed in my quest to act as a translator between words. There were too many people who didn’t want to hear the stories of others, who felt that listening was tantamount to weakness, who believed that humanizing “the other” was dangerous. Opening yourself up to other perspectives certainly shattered illusions one had about simple narratives of good guys and bad guys, of black and white. And living in the gray was not easy.”