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War Tourist: Memoirs of a Foreign Correspondent
Hilary Brown has filed television reports from every continent except Antarctica. She was once profiled on TVO's 'The Agenda' as 'Canada's best-ever female foreign correspondent.'
This embarrasses her.
She was one of the last journalists to be lifted by helicopter from the roof of the American Embassy in Saigon in 1975, during the Communist takeover of South Vietnam. One of her ABC reports later appeared in the motion picture 'The Deer Hunter' in what Brown calls her 'fifteen seconds of fame.'
During the 1980's she was an Anchor for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation in Toronto, an experience she describes as 'death by hairspray.' She later returned to ABC News for another 18 years to do the work she loved foreign news reporting.
She was married to the British biographer and BBC correspondent John Bierman, who she met in Pakistan during the Indo-Pak war of 1971. He became her mentor, best friend, and father of her only child. Their life together, in half a dozen countries over three decades, is a great love story that only ended with his death in 2006. As a widow, Brown continued to work at what she calls 'the best job in the world' before she finally hung up her trench coat. Two years later she fell in love with a Canadian businessman who, until the global pandemic, flew her around the world in the relentless pursuit of pseudo-extreme sports for which she was totally unqualified. She says he keeps her in a constant state of excitement and fear, which is just like being a foreign correspondent, all over again.
Foreign correspondents are like war tourists in flak jackets, ' she writes. 'They document human misery, and then move on.' But many are left with the emotional baggage of guilt, and a search for atonement. This is one of the many themes in Brown's lively memoir, and it's quite a ride.
To readers of all ages, but especially her own, her message is that life is never over... until it's over.
This embarrasses her.
She was one of the last journalists to be lifted by helicopter from the roof of the American Embassy in Saigon in 1975, during the Communist takeover of South Vietnam. One of her ABC reports later appeared in the motion picture 'The Deer Hunter' in what Brown calls her 'fifteen seconds of fame.'
During the 1980's she was an Anchor for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation in Toronto, an experience she describes as 'death by hairspray.' She later returned to ABC News for another 18 years to do the work she loved foreign news reporting.
She was married to the British biographer and BBC correspondent John Bierman, who she met in Pakistan during the Indo-Pak war of 1971. He became her mentor, best friend, and father of her only child. Their life together, in half a dozen countries over three decades, is a great love story that only ended with his death in 2006. As a widow, Brown continued to work at what she calls 'the best job in the world' before she finally hung up her trench coat. Two years later she fell in love with a Canadian businessman who, until the global pandemic, flew her around the world in the relentless pursuit of pseudo-extreme sports for which she was totally unqualified. She says he keeps her in a constant state of excitement and fear, which is just like being a foreign correspondent, all over again.
Foreign correspondents are like war tourists in flak jackets, ' she writes. 'They document human misery, and then move on.' But many are left with the emotional baggage of guilt, and a search for atonement. This is one of the many themes in Brown's lively memoir, and it's quite a ride.
To readers of all ages, but especially her own, her message is that life is never over... until it's over.
498 pages, Hardcover
Published September 28, 2021
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
February 1, 2022
War Tourist: Memoirs of a Foreign Correspondent is a terrific book – it reels you in, at an unrelenting pace, through tale after tale of the exploits of a trail-blazer among some of the bravest women and men of our time, including high-powered, media peers. And it holds you fast enthralled, and amazed.
Hilary Brown has lived multiple lives in one single life, with many friends and several lovers, a beautiful marriage of thirty years, and an incredible professional career, which exposed her – and exposes you and me, her readers! – to high adventure, moments of extreme danger and the almost unimaginable suffering of others.
Starting out professionally in Montreal in the late 1960s with the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation [CBC], Brown later became the first female foreign correspondent for ABC News. And ABC became her principal long-time employer for roughly thirty years.
Looking back on her long career, she confesses that, despite her “exciting happy lucky life”, her role as foreign correspondent for major news media has made her feel like a “war tourist”. “It was [her] job to report on the sufferings of others, and then move on.”
Brown describes residual guilt at her incapacity to save others, including her Vietnamese translator and his family in Saigon, and free them from the jaws of war.
The book draws you into the author’s passion for adventure, languages, dramatic landscapes, unfamiliar cultures and faraway places. Lyrical passages are devoted, for example, to the “exquisite” forested kingdom of Bhutan in 1996, a “secretive Shangri-La” in the Himalayan mountains, governed by “an enlightened king” who had taken up royal duties at the age of sixteen. Brown declares Bhutan the “Country of Gross National Happiness”.
At the same time, in 439 pages [not counting the notes!], the book confronts the reader with searing observations of some of the worst conflicts in our times. Bosnia, Rwanda, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Zaire, Iraq: Hilary Brown was there, on-the-spot, keen-eyed, and reporting. It is no surprise that some of her personal experiences as a foreign correspondent were life-threatening – such as the mauling she received by a “screaming mob of men”, in the Iranian city of Tabriz. Until one of the men stepped back to release her, and the others followed, Brown believed that she would be torn apart.
Yet the book offers good laughs, too. In checking in with Air Transat, the author [“ABC’s leading Stuff Queen”] was informed that her carry-on bag holding 20 kilos of tribal jewellery was 15 kilos over-limit – whereupon she wrapped the excess weight around her body, including “four metal belts, a half-dozen necklaces, and three matched pairs of tribal bangles” and “clanked” across the departure lounge wearing a raincoat, before depositing her souvenir trophies into a security screening bin. When the items re-emerged from the scanner, no one questioned her.
War Tourist is a truly great read. Speaking as one reader, I was wholly engaged, and award the book five stars.
Hilary Brown has lived multiple lives in one single life, with many friends and several lovers, a beautiful marriage of thirty years, and an incredible professional career, which exposed her – and exposes you and me, her readers! – to high adventure, moments of extreme danger and the almost unimaginable suffering of others.
Starting out professionally in Montreal in the late 1960s with the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation [CBC], Brown later became the first female foreign correspondent for ABC News. And ABC became her principal long-time employer for roughly thirty years.
Looking back on her long career, she confesses that, despite her “exciting happy lucky life”, her role as foreign correspondent for major news media has made her feel like a “war tourist”. “It was [her] job to report on the sufferings of others, and then move on.”
Brown describes residual guilt at her incapacity to save others, including her Vietnamese translator and his family in Saigon, and free them from the jaws of war.
The book draws you into the author’s passion for adventure, languages, dramatic landscapes, unfamiliar cultures and faraway places. Lyrical passages are devoted, for example, to the “exquisite” forested kingdom of Bhutan in 1996, a “secretive Shangri-La” in the Himalayan mountains, governed by “an enlightened king” who had taken up royal duties at the age of sixteen. Brown declares Bhutan the “Country of Gross National Happiness”.
At the same time, in 439 pages [not counting the notes!], the book confronts the reader with searing observations of some of the worst conflicts in our times. Bosnia, Rwanda, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Zaire, Iraq: Hilary Brown was there, on-the-spot, keen-eyed, and reporting. It is no surprise that some of her personal experiences as a foreign correspondent were life-threatening – such as the mauling she received by a “screaming mob of men”, in the Iranian city of Tabriz. Until one of the men stepped back to release her, and the others followed, Brown believed that she would be torn apart.
Yet the book offers good laughs, too. In checking in with Air Transat, the author [“ABC’s leading Stuff Queen”] was informed that her carry-on bag holding 20 kilos of tribal jewellery was 15 kilos over-limit – whereupon she wrapped the excess weight around her body, including “four metal belts, a half-dozen necklaces, and three matched pairs of tribal bangles” and “clanked” across the departure lounge wearing a raincoat, before depositing her souvenir trophies into a security screening bin. When the items re-emerged from the scanner, no one questioned her.
War Tourist is a truly great read. Speaking as one reader, I was wholly engaged, and award the book five stars.
November 14, 2021
This is meaningful, exciting story of the life of an ABC war correspondent and an anchor for CBC news. The details and pain of world tragedies are balanced with the personal stories of journalist Hilary Brown. It is those personal stories that make the reader keep going and also make the reader marvel at how journalists cope with what they are reporting on on a daily basis. Brown has saved bits of personal humour and intriguing stories of the most beautiful geography and people on earth. But what stands out is her journalistic lack of bias. She wanders into a story expecting to find something that will blow our televisions apart but she is able to look deeper, to find further evidence and to give a fair shake to the entire story, or as Brown says, to see the “ gray” area between what we in North America tend to see as black and white. It should be a text book for Journalism courses. I couldn’t put it down until I was satisfied that she lived to tell the tale.
January 9, 2022
Hilary Brown was the first female war correspondent for a major American news network. He first conflict was the Bangladesh independence in 1971 and her last was the Iraq civil war in the late 2000s She has given us an edge-of-your-seat compelling and colourful account of the struggle to get the job, the balance between family and work, the upheavals of sickness and love -- all intespersed with clear explanations of the global conflicts of our time. Hilary was a January guest on Goldster Inside Story
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews