It's What I Do
A Photographer's Life of Love and War
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4.6 • 16 Ratings
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- $15.99
Publisher Description
The New York Times bestselling memoir by Pulitzer Prize-winning war photojournalist Lynsey Addario
"Beautifully written and vividly illustrated . . . Addario is an artist of empathy, a witness not to grand ideas about human sacrifice and suffering, but to human beings, simply being." —The Boston Globe
"An unflinching memoir." —The Washington Post
A young photojournalist just finding her way, Lynsey Addario is sent to Afghanistan after the attacks of September 11. As she documents the complex lives of the Afghan people, both under Taliban rule and after the U.S. invasion, Addario finds her calling as a war photographer — a calling that will lead her into virtually every major theater of war in the twenty-first century. She photographs the civilian casualties and misunderstood insurgents of the Iraq War, as well as the burned villages and countless dead in Darfur. She exposes a culture of violence against women in the Congo and gets kidnapped by pro-Qaddafi forces in the Libyan civil war.
This relentless pursuit of truth shapes Addario's life. As a woman photojournalist, she fights her way into a boys' club of a profession. Rather than choose between her personal life and her career, Addario learns to strike a necessary balance. In the man who will become her husband, she finds at last a real love to complement her work, not take away from it, and as a new mother, she gains an all-the-more intensely personal understanding of the fragility of life.
Watching uprisings unfold and people fight to the death for their freedom, Addario understands she is documenting not only news but also the fate of societies. It’s What I Do is more than just a snapshot of life on the front lines; it is witness to the human cost of war.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
A love letter to the artistic and political power of photography, Lynsey Addario’s memoir is a moving portrait of a life driven by curiosity, courage and a sense of purpose. We were transfixed by Addario’s stories, which cover everything from her bohemian upbringing—her hairstylist parents’ Connecticut home was party central in the ’70s—to her harrowing ordeal as a captive of Qaddafi’s militia in Libya. It’s What I Do offers a candid look at the life of a combat-zone photographer and the tension between capturing hard-hitting images and holding onto meaningful personal relationships.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Addario, a photojournalist, documentary photographer, MacArthur Genius Grant recipient, and part of a Pulitzer Prize winning team for work on a magazine story about the Taliban, presents a highly readable and thoroughly engaging memoir of her experiences around world, documenting and filing photographs in hostile areas for some of the U.S.'s most well-known publications including the New York Times, National Geographic, Time magazine. She touches on aspects of her childhood and upbringing in Connecticut, but focuses mainly on her professional career and development as a photojournalist in the post-9/11 world. She describes her experiences in Afghanistan, India, Iraq, Pakistan, Sudan, and elsewhere including being kidnapped three weeks into the Libyan uprising of 2011. Addario astutely addresses the difficulties of being a woman in a "brutally competitive," overwhelmingly male profession. She also articulates the passion that compels her and others to continue this difficult and dangerous work, while shedding light on the logistics, risks, and other considerations involved in documenting world events for newspapers and magazines. Addario's memoir brilliantly succeeds not only as a personal and professional narrative but also as an illuminating homage to photojournalism's role in documenting suffering and injustice, and its potential to influence public opinion and official policy. Photos.
