Book description
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. His reporting of these events has always
been distinguished by his tenaciously researched facts - especially
facts that governments and powerful interests would prefer to keep
secret - and by his unerring and always compassionate pursuit of 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 Cambodia and Vietnam. He has been
International Reporter of the Year and winner of the United Nations
Associated Peace Prize and Gold Medal. For his broadcasting, he has
won France's Reporter Sans Frontières, an American television Academy
Award, an Emmy, and the Richard Dimbleby Award, given by the British
Academy of Film and Television Arts.
In 2003, he received the Sophie Prize for 'thirty years of exposing
deception and improving human rights'.
