Flirting with Danger

December 24, 2001
The words "love" and "disaster" should have found their way into this illuminating but uneven memoir's title: in her account of her years as a CNN correspondent in flash points around the world, Darrow is nearly always in (or searching for) the former and nearly always on the brink of the latter. Darrow covered civil wars in Georgia and Chechnya, the Soviet "dis-Union" of the early 1990s and the troubles in Northern Ireland, and did so with remarkable, bullet-dodging courage; she also found herself struggling with difficult family relationships and a host of lamentable boyfriends. Sometimes such strikingly different subjects don't fit comfortably into a single narrative, but Darrow tries admirably (if not always successfully) to explain each in terms of the other. Russia in the 1980s "felt like one giant dysfunctional family. I was perfectly at home there," she writes; later, in the Balkans, she muses that it may have been because of the dynamics in her own family "that I felt so drawn to trying to understand the less popular views around the world." Darrow's tale contains plenty of similar and mawkish revelations, but it also offers memorable snapshots of life on the front lines: when Yeltsin's tanks shoot missiles at the Parliament building in Moscow in October 1993, women pushing strollers stopped to watch the fireworks; hospitable Georgian rebels called temporary cease-fires to feed CNN reporters; Darrow herself got a spa manicure while listening to exploding shells in the Croatian streets. These moments are the book's best—they feel sharp and real, on the one hand, and on the other, they're a lot less familiar than the usual workaholic's quest for love and inner peace.

June 1, 2002
Adult/High School-Darrow offers an intimate, revealing description of her life not only as a war correspondent, but also as a woman searching for her own happiness. Born into a dysfunctional family, she re-created unhealthy patterns over and over in her life. As a teenager she was a quiet honor student, and a smoker, drinker, and shoplifter. As a university student in Russia, she married a Russian fashion photographer even though she knew that it would "entangle her in a green card marriage with a man who was not really in love with me." From her descriptions of the nearly empty food stores with only slightly edible food to the maternity wards of Moscow, the author captures the haunting despair and dysfunction of everyday life in Communist Russia. She recounts reporting from the front lines in Chechnya, Serbia, Northern Ireland, Israel, and Albania. In Chechnya, "they [the CNN crew] lived like animals, the way most people live in a war," working 18 to 20 hours a day to produce a 2-minute story. With the same courage and honesty that she reported events on the front line, Darrow also reports on her own constant search for love and companionship. Students will gain insight into foreign cultures and the slow maturation of a courageous woman in search of herself. A compelling mixture of love and war in exotic settings.-Jane S. Drabkin, Chinn Park Regional Library, Prince William, VA

Copyright 2002 School Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.