Unreasonable Behaviour

Don McCullin, one of the UK's best photojournalists, has written a number of books about his extraordinary life - first as a photographer attached to the Observer and then with The Sunday Times. This is perhaps the best of them - a straightforward account of a career which has placed him in more dangerous situations than anyone else would want to shake a camera at. Every chapter in the book shows him in yet another war zone - with the mercenaries in the Congo (led by the truly awful 'Mad' Mike Hoare); in Vietnam, picking up something someone had dropped, to find it was a severed human foot; in Biafra, watching women burning like torches; as a prisoner of Idi Amin - perhaps the most frightening experience of his life; on the Golan Heights, in Amman and El Salvador. These are sights, as he says, 'that should, and do, bring pain, and shame, and guilt'- his anecdotes are bloody and terrible. At the end of each chapter, the question for the reader is: but why did he carry on, why after a short period of leave at home, did he set off for yet another war, knowing very well indeed that he would be likely at some stage to find himself, again, standing in line with a group of other prisoners - 'journalists - dirty men', as one Congolese officer scornfully said as he ordered up the firing squad? As John le Carre has said, 'he has known all forms of fear, he's an expert in it.' The other question is how McCullin managed to survive when so many guns were pointed, cold-bloodedly, straight at his chest. It is always difficult to know, when a book is written 'with' another writer - in this case the experienced Lewis Chester - just how much credit should go to the protagonist; in this case there can be no doubt - these nightmares are Don McCullin's own, and no one can finish this book without being (a) thankful that the experiences are not their own, and (b) being grateful that someone has had the courage to record them. (Kirkus UK)