A check on the new acquisitions shelf at Greater Victoria Public turned up the 2006 revised third edition of the Granta Book of Reportage. Most of the pieces were in the first edition in 1993. Most of them are long, most are immediate and thoughtful and all are well-written. The thinking tends to represent the conventional wisdom of the British Left intelligentia, Germaine Greer's coverage of Women and Power in Cuba being nearly effusive in praising a Marxist, egalitarian social experiment. Some pieces were translated from East European publications. Ryszard Kapusicinski covered the 1969 soccer war between Honduras and El Salvador. Svetlana Alexiyevich's piece "The Boys in Zinc" (the bodies came back in zinc lined coffins) distills the Russian occupation of Afghanistan into a series of short first person fictional narratives.
November 2006 Archives
Continue reading Reportage.
Watching TV. The Green Berets has turned up on cable. What does the movie have in common with Star Trek and Heroes?
