There's One Book You Must Read this Summer

No Ordinary Assignment by Jane Ferguson

Greetings all. I’m on my way back from a much-needed break after mostly wrapping up the Audible project I’ll be announcing shortly. In coming days I’ll be bringing you up to speed on all the reporting developments around the topics you know I love to cover. Epstein, Kushner, Trump and more.

First, however, I need to tell you about a book, out tomorrow, July 11th. No Ordinary Assignment by Jane Ferguson.

Jane is one of the rising stars in the elite tiny group of TV correspondents who report from dangerous far-flung war zones. She’s currently the Special Correspondent for PBS Newshour. She’s won an Emmy, the George Polk Award and a Peabody Award. She’s done incredibly difficult, dangerous reporting from deep inside Somalia, Syria, Yemen, Iraq, Egypt, Afghanistan, Beirut and more.

But what makes her memoir a standout, the best memoir I’ve read since Michelle Obama’s Becoming, is the writing that borders on the poetic. In a way her prose style reminds me of Harper Lee, a novelist who was no war reporter—but just as Lee could transport her readers into a sun-baked street in the South, where time slowed, fans fluttered, and sweat beads gathered, so, too Ferguson takes us deep into the smells, the sounds, the spirit of the people in the conflict zones she buries herself in.

Take, for example her evocative description of Mogadishu:

No matter how hot the city gets, there is always a strong breeze coming off the ocean, and the stark quality of the sunlight only brightens the colors everywhere. Palm trees rise up from the rubble, swaying in the wind, and giant heaps of pink bougainvillea lean over whitewashed walls, drawing your eye away from the ruins like a defiant smile. Vegetation had begun to reclaim some abandoned parts of the city, as creepers and trees spread through homes and back- yards and peeling, abandoned swimming pools in once-bougie neighborhoods. It was like walking through someone else’s memories.

And, yes, too she lets us feel the omni-present danger and suffering—but it’s in the minutiae, the details of the living and the present, that the places and the people around her come fully alive for the reader—thereby making destruction, when it comes, all the more devastating.

And that’s the point she strives to make again and again. War reporting should not be about covering the “bang bang” of flying bullets and explosions, but about the contrast between humanity and inhumanity. You need to see one to comprehend the awfulness of the other. Sadly, the US news networks often focus on the noise and the danger, when they rush in and out of war zones - not what it all means to the lives of the people affected. There isn’t time (or money) to go there.

Ferguson, by contrast, presents life and lives, through a lens that focuses on not what makes the strangers she meets different - but what makes them universal. They are mothers, fathers, children. They are brave, they are wise. They suffer. They celebrate. On one occasion she explains to her colleagues that they absolutely must accept an invitation to lunch from a Houthi leader in Yemen she’s just interviewed, no matter there is increasing risk of an air strike. It would be a devastating insult not to.

In a room that seemed surprisingly intact, we were served plates piled high with rice and roasted chicken, vegetables stewed in tomato sauce, and other delicious Yemeni dishes as well as heaps of fresh bread. Al-Houthi sat at the top of the table, grunting and laughing and making comments to the women in the group while shoveling food into his mouth, a significant portion of which ended up on his own rounded front and lap. There were around twelve of us in total. This would be a dreadful reason to die, I thought as I filled up with warm spiced rice.

Finding the thread of human connection is the key to her success as a reporter—but also as a writer.

A poignant moment, for example, is when she wins over Qais, a skeptical but brilliant producer in Afghanistan, who isn’t sure that she is ready to cover his beloved country. He takes her to see the family of a civilian victim of recent bombing

I could hear the wailing the moment the wooden door to the backyard was opened. The family had gathered, and women sat on the floor while men walked around in deep shock and sorrow. Children wandered barefooted and wide-eyed, overwhelmed by the commotion and pain the adults were displaying. The loss of a breadwinner to a family like this in Afghanistan is devastating, endangering the ability of dozens of people to feed themselves. These violent civilian deaths were profoundly unjust, meted out by a war that cared nothing about a man walking to work. I pulled a scarf over my head and steeled myself against the grief.

Standing quietly to the side, I let Qais mumble inquiries and offer his respects to the men in the yard. The wailing grew as another news crew, this one from local TV station TOLO, interviewed a woman. I watched, unable to understand their Farsi. Yet I was aware of the only thing there was to know: the wound this loss had forced her to endure. She wore a green shawl and sat on a simple wooden seat, crying. My breath quickened and my throat tightened as I watched her. I wiped a tear away with my shawl and tried to compose myself. I saw Qais staring at me, and when I looked back, something between us clicked. There was a knowledge in his face, like a puzzle had been solved. Maybe Qais had wanted to know if I cared enough to cover the country he loved. He had heard that I was brave: tales of my work in Syria had impressed many at the network, and local bureaus competed for the most swashbuckling of correspondents. But bravery doesn’t equate care. It mattered to Qais that I gave a damn. After that day, we were inseparable.

The arc of the book is the story of her own life and her determination to succeed covering the kinds of stories and people she cares about despite a nagging feeling, for all sorts of reasons, she just might never get there. There’s the chilling, damning voice of her mother always in her head. Plus an endless frustrating skepticism from bureaucrats in the TV industry who love her work, but just don’t want to pay her properly—something that wasn’t surprising but nonetheless is infuriating to read.

Some of the most heinous scenes in the book are not out in the bloodied dust and heat, but in the air-conditioned offices of TV networks in New York or London, where over-paid (and likely ignorant) executives repeatedly reject her from staff jobs, sometimes honing in on her accent—not American enough—or her looks (again, my blood boiled). Contrast that with a hair-raising moment where her hotel, supposedly secure, comes under siege from the Taliban, bullets zing and only the arrival of the Afghan Special Forces saves the guests (Ferguson included); or the awful scene when the diners at the restaurant she’s scheduled to lunch in the next day, are shot dead at the table…and you want to tell these producers to get some perspective—and a budget.

Ferguson is an utterly compelling narrator because she’s startlingly honest and vulnerable. In Somalia, she writes that her first challenge is not so much bullets as a rat in the bedroom, where she lies petrified under mosquito netting, able not just to hear the creature but to feel it when it leaps on her bed, “its massive bulk felt more like that of a Labrador puppy than a rat.” The rat makes off with most of her belongings including her hairbrush.

She makes mistakes, including, on one occasion inviting the wrong man to her bedroom. She cries. She recovers. Sometimes she capitulates to what might be the more “sensible” option, covering British royalty, because it might pay. As part of her capitulation, she even depletes her savings to get a nose job. She’s aware that the price of falling in love with far-flung, dangerous reporting is that it leaves little or no room for a partnership at home, wherever home may be.

But she never gives up. Even when she takes a left or right turn, she course corrects. I’ll admit that when Ferguson, who is a friend, told me she was writing a memoir, I did wonder if, at 38, she was a little young to do this, although I was completely fascinated by the conflicts and the regions she’d covered.

Now, I wish she’d begun writing for publication back in her 20s, while she reported on camera. As talented and brave as she is as a TV correspondent, she is that rare person in TV who can really write. She knows how to create distance. What to put in, what to leave out. How to win a reader’s trust. How to make us feel that we are with her on extraordinary travels. How to inspire women everywhere to dream and to stick to our guns. No Ordinary Assignment is a hard act to follow with a sequel. But follow it she must.