The Mammoth Book of War Correspondents — Jon E. Lewis

War is hell. It is also suffering, courage, fear, nobility, depravity, honor, death. War in all its aspects, from the tragic to the horrific to the heroic, is vividly depicted in this riveting volume of dispatches by established authors like Stephen Crane, Rudyard Kipling, George Orwell, and Ernest Hemingway, who turned their literary hand to, respectively, the Spanish-American War, Boer War, Spanish Civil War, and D-Day 1944, as well as professional news correspondents like Ernie Pyle, Alan Moorehead, Peter Arnett, and John Hersey, who made something like art out of war reportage. Eyewitness accounts of other writers among the one hundred in this volume include William L. Shirer's on the surrender of the French in World War II, Edward R. Murrow's on the London Blitz, Alexander Werth's on the siege of Leningrad, and Martha Gellhorn's on the Battle of the Bulge. Found here, too, are David Halberstrom's Pulitzer Prize-winning piece on the coup against Diem, Seymour Hersh on the My Lai massacre, and John Pilger on the last day in Saigon. Not only did these men and women brave the dangers of war; they also combated often obstructive military officers and disingenuous politicians to get their story and to report the truth as they saw it. Beginning with William Howard Russell's reports from Crimea, which mark the birth of war reportage, and ending on the battle lines in Bosnia, here is war -- what it looks like, what it means, and how it has been fought for 150 years.