This is a remarkable memoir for a number of reasons. It describes a career already made redundant by technology, cost and public indifference. It includes graphic eye-witness accounts of many of the most headline-grabbing international episodes of the past 30 years. It introduces readers to a wide range of current and past players on the world stage from almost every part of the globe. And it is self published — because no commercial or academic publisher in the U.S. or U.K. would touch it.
Foreign correspondents like Ray Moseley belong to an endangered species today and the calculation of the publishing industry must be that no one is sufficiently interested in their unique stories to buy a book about them. More’s the pity. Moseley, a reporter on the Arkansas Gazette, Detroit Free Press, UPI and the Chicago Tribune  from 1952 to 2001 — itself something of a record for longevity in a notoriously short-term business — has written a vivid account of a life on the road that recalls, as the book’s publicity puts it, “a golden age in American journalism when hundreds of correspondents still roamed the world.”
 
Versatility and resourcefulness
There is not space in a review like this to detail all the places, incidents and events included by Moseley. Suffice to say that among other events he covered the first Indo-Pakistan war, revolution in Iran, the Six-Day War, the fall of the Berlin Wall, the breakup of Yugoslavia, the collapse of communism in the Soviet bloc, conflict in Northern Ireland, civil war in Rhodesia, strife in South Africa and much else besides.
A reader is left amazed at the versatility, stamina, resourcefulness and dogged legwork that kept Moseley chasing the news for so many years in so many awful places. He rarely questions the value of what he was doing and looks back at it all with a suitably skeptical, laconic glance.
 
Truth and transparency
A persistent advocate of truth, justice and transparency, he deplores the “ignorance” of the American people about the world at large which, he argues, politicians have exploited mercilessly since the Vietnam era. Much of the blame, he writes, lies with supine editors and publishers reluctant to play the adversarial role that should define the Fourth Estate. Yet he is always clear about the limited role of the correspondent in the field, often deploring colleagues who overstepped the bounds or became too involved.
As this remark suggests, Moseley is not shy about naming names and settling a few scores along the way. Like virtually all foreign correspondents, he has some horror stories about head office. Reporters who shirk danger, deliberately twist or exaggerate events or get too close to government arouse his ire. Many of his targets are dead, but not all.
 
Precipitous decline
What does a book like this tell us about journalism now and in the second half of the 20th century? Communications have improved out of all recognition. But the flip side of this advance is that commitment to sustained on-the-scene reporting has withered along with perspective, weekly newsmagazines and costly foreign bureaus. As technology has evolved, the importance of the mainstream writing press throughout the developed world has declined precipitously, challenged now even by “citizen journalists” armed with cell phones.
Today, a once-great newspaper like the Chicago Tribune has closed its foreign bureaus, instead relying on cheap freelancers and itinerant firemen dispatched from base to give its foreign coverage any character. Little or no investment is being made in people or training. In contrast, it took Moseley 25 years’ hard slog from his start on the Galveston Daily News to make it to the Tribune’s news desk. Language skills, once considered crucial, now seem to be optional.
 
Courage and a notebook
Within organizations, the institutional memory of events and situations provided by more experienced journalists has almost entirely disappeared.
“A huge talent pool has been swept out of the door,” Moseley observes sadly. “I can only give thanks that my career ended when it did. Had I come into journalism just a few years ago, and finished work a half century from now, I would never have had experiences remotely similar to those recounted in this book.”
That, in itself, makes it worthwhile to read this memoir simply to recall a lost world where a man or woman with determination, courage and a notebook was often the main link between a great city like Chicago and the rest of the world. Moseley has done a service to journalism by recalling this very recent era before it is forgotten for good.
Knight was a foreign correspondent for U.S. News & World Report for 28 years from 1968 to 1996 and reviewed books for Time magazine from 1998 to 2003.