The Kindness of Strangers [Illustrated] (Hardcover)

Reporter Kate Adie describes the horrors of this war which, according to the BBC, should not be called a war. Her Northern Ireland is populated by grey-faced people who hate each other, '...a mass of badly nourished bags of nerves'. She tells of fights breaking out at funerals, of riots stopping dead because a Glasgow Rangers match was about to start. Of bleach thrown at soldiers, of soldiers sweeping ornaments from a woman's mantelpiece.

She recounts how her career took her from local radio where there was some question as to whether anybody was listening; to Libya, where someone was listening even when she wasn't on air - if you wanted room service, the best way to get it was to ring London and complain about how slow it was.

As with many autobiographies of women doing traditional men's work, the personal details were fascinating - the anecdote about what happened to the grubby tabloid hack going through her tent while she was reporting the first Gulf War was particularly good. This book also shows clearly that our Kate can use her elbows and fists if she has to. However, the book gave the impression of a very private woman - she drops hints about 'above average shopping' and singing and sailing and finding her biological mother, and then clams right up again. I wanted to stop her and ask for more - but that's better, I suppose, than wishing she would shut up.

I found this book badly edited. Possibly, the publishers were too scared of her to curb the sheer joy of a woman used to reporting in three-minute segments suddenly released into 400 pages. It is certainly very chatty and immediate, but a bit of careful red pen work would have tightened it up.

Read this book:
* if you want to work for the BBC
* if you want to be a journalist
* if you are a news junkie
* if you want to know what really happened in Libya, Northern Ireland and Kuwait
* if you admire Kate Adie's work

Kate Adie is widely regarded in the UK as one of the countries most fearless and respected journalists. She has worked in warzones from Belfast to Beijing and Bosnia to Basra.

I read this book with awe. It covers her life from the age of 12 in Newcastle, where she claims she was a painfully shy girl; and her eventual and almost accidental career with the BBC, first in local radio and then through regional TV, before her eventual rise to international fame reporting from some of the most dangerous and lethal troublespots on the planet.

The most appealing thing about this book is the way she describes her various adventures with considerable self-depricating good humour and a raconteurs eye for detail. Yet through the jokes you see touches of the steel and fire that make her such an outstanding correspondent - her determination to not just get the story but to get the story right, regardless of the risks whether dodging bullets on the streets of Beijing or with the British Army in Iraq.

This is without a doubt one of the funniest and most entertaining reads of the year. And yet it is also a touching and intimate prortrait. Highly reccomended.