War Junkie

Jon Steele was one of ITN's most distinguished cameramen for many years, and in that capacity he travelled to wars and insurrections in Georgia, Abkhazia, Moscow, Rwanda, Zaire, Sarajevo and elsewhere. This memoir of his life starts with a mental and emotional breakdown at Heathrow Airport, and reading the book the main question the reader asks is how the author managed to survive more or less intact until then. The horrors about which he writes are graphic and unforgiving - brutal violence, dead, dying, tortured people - and the continual struggle to remain aloof; to photograph the child dying of hunger or as the result of savagery rather than helping him - though occasionally Steele was forced into action by conscience or human pity. But the book is better than a simple record of the life of a cameraman in various war zones, for Steele also writes of his own emotional life, and vividly conveys what it is like to reject one's family and continually to betray one's private life for one's job. Extreme danger reveals a great deal about a human being, and Steele's record of what it was like to share danger with a number of reporters, and to recoil from it into uncertain private relationships, is particularly interesting. As far as war goes, the title of the book is perfectly accurate: he was indeed a 'junkie'. Though he had the normal human reaction to the inhumanity he witnessed, he was unable not to return to it: it had become an irresistible drug. Two questions remain: first, why has the publisher thought fit to issue a book about a cameraman without any examples of his work, and secondly, how is it that page after page of the book consists of often quite complex conversations, reported word-for-word? Total recall? We cannot know. But this is certainly a compelling record of a peculiarly self-destructive career. (Kirkus UK)