Dirty Wars and Polished Silver
The Life and Times of a War Correspondent Turned Ambassatrix
Lynda Schuster
Melville House, hardcover, Kindle
Lynda Schuster grew up in Detroit wanting to not repeat her mother’s safe-at-home-with-family lifestyle. So, she did the exact opposite. She left home and ended up in Israel during the Yom Kippur War. This sharpened her appetite for adventure, so she soon became a war correspondent in gritty, dangerous places: primarily Central America, South America, the Middle East, and Southern Africa, writing for the Wall Street Journal and later the Christian Science Monitor.
Her new book, Dirty Wars and Polished Silver: The Life and Times of a War Correspondent Turned Ambassatrix, is a well-written memoir that intimately describes three major chapters of her life: How she worked as a reporter in dangerous war zones; how she became the wife (while still reporting) of a Los Angeles Times correspondent who was killed 10 months later in Honduras; and how her life again changed dramatically after she married a U.S. diplomat who became Ambassador to Liberia and then Peru. For her, it was quite a transition, from dodging bullets and meeting deadlines to being sure the proper silverware was set out for posh embassy dinners.
In her book, she tells many funny stories and anecdotes from within the worlds of journalism and diplomacy. But she does not hide her sadness and disgust over the senseless violence and destruction that wars bring to helpless civilians.
For anyone who has ever dreamed of reporting from the frontlines of war or trying to do good works for humanity in isolated, faraway places, Lynda Schuster’s Dirty Wars and Polished Silver can be eye-opening, informative, entertaining–and definitely sobering.
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