Heroes [Paperback]

"John Pilger is the antidote to easy, comfortable thinking, to smugness, to ignorance. He is necessary." --"Daily Telegraph"

"Pilger has a gift for finding the image, the instant, that reveals all. He is a photographer using words instead of a camera." --Salman Rushdie

The 'heroes' of John Pilger's narrative are the many ordinary people he has witnessed coping with their lives in difficult and often brutal conditions: dissidents in the Soviet Union; victims of conflicts in Vietnam, Cambodia, Africa, India, the Middle East and Central America. They also include the Irish labouring generation of his great-great-grandfather, transported in irons to Australia for uttering 'unlawful oaths'. It is a vivid, engrossing and sometimes blackly amusing personal story covering the periods for which his journalism is renowned. John Pilger has witnessed many of the major world upheavals of the past thirty years, as well as the daily realities of injustices normally hidden from society's view, and his reporting of these events has always been distinguished by his compassion for the ordinary people caught up in them, and the intense desire to tell the truth.

John Pilger grew up in Sydney, Australia. He has been a war correspondent, author and film-maker. He has twice won British journalism's highest award, that of Journalist of the Year, for his work all over the world, notably in Vietnam and Cambodia. Among a number of other awards, he has been International Reporter of the Year and winner of the United Nations Association Media Peace Prize. For his broadcasting, he has won France's Reporter Sans Frontières, an American television Academy Award, and Emmy, and the Richard Dimbleby Award, given by the British Academy of Film and Television Arts. He lives in London.