Looking for Trouble: One Woman, Six Wars and a Revolution

By Leslie Cockburn

Book Overview

News correspondent Leslie Cockburn has dined with the Cali Cartel, marched with the Khmer Rouge, hunted down the Black Turban in Afghanistan, pursued the Russian mafia to the Arctic Circle, shared pomegranate sauce with the Ayatollahs, and stopped a small Kurdish war, but she has never told these stories in a book-until now.

Cockburn was one of the first women to break into the tight fraternity of combat and third-world reportage when she began work at the London bureau of NBC News in 1976-where successful news gathering required "unorthodox tactics, stamina, and, for best results, a criminal mind." By the time she moved to CBS's "60 Minutes," Cockburn had interviewed Muammar Qaddaffi and Margaret Thatcher, been arrested as spy in Gambia, and effectively eliminated whatever doubts her colleagues might have had about a woman's ability to tackle the news business's most dangerous assignments.

A mother of three who has made a career of breaking down barriers, Leslie Cockburn has exposed the tobacco lobby in Washington and human rights violations in Cambodia, and her impact on foreign and domestic policy has been as powerful as her impact on the rights and prerogatives of working women. In an industry in which, as late as 1973, women had to lobby to wear trousers to work, Leslie Cockburn was determined to combine a strong family life with a strong professional life, sacrificing neither.

With a cast of generals, drug lords, rock stars, and kings, LOOKING FOR TROUBLE is the incredible story of a career that has spanned the history-making news events of the last two decades.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0385483554
• ISBN13: 9780385483551
• Release Date: February 1999
• Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
• Length: 288 Pages
• Weight: 0.82 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 5.5" x 8.5"

Customer Reviews

Indiana Jones' Well-Bred Sister

The narrator is one of the strongest female characters I've read in a long time---intelligent, well-read, daring, tactful, witty, and with good taste in everything. Her adventures through the most dangerous political areas put a new spin on what you hear in the newspaper, from rather ridiculous dictator families to the horrible living conditions of villages in countries that have declared martial law. It's a fast read.

Don't leave for Baghdad without it...

Well-written, fast-paced account of a smart, savvy female journalist's rise to power in the male-dominated media area of combat coverage & "sensitive" foreign issues. It offers inside stories on a number of the world's political hot spots (and some of the US's nastiest foreign policy decisions). The book is structured engagingly too. The first chapter covers one of the author's more recent assignments -- and a journalistic pinnacle, as the Taliban story Leslie produces is co-anchored by Barbara Walters and Diane Sawyer; the latter, not Walters, went with her to Afghanistan. The subsequent chapters chronicle her some of her career's hairiest moments from its start two decades ago. Leslie's vivid descriptions of what she sees, as well as the acerbic comments she drily inserts, make her seem personally likable and as though she'd be an extremely entertaining dinner guest (though possessed of an excellent political BS detector). More on her family would have been nice, but this book is focused primarily on her work and how she does it; snapshots rather than the full-length autobiography with full-fleshed auxiliary characters. Still, riveting and hard to put down.

Better than Ian Fleming, Tom Clancy, et. al.

I have not been so enthralled with a journalist's memoirs since the first half of Theodore H. White's "In Search of History." This book was fascinating from cover to cover. When I told my wife about it she would open up the book at random and read for several pages, totally engrossed. She almost read the entire book through this sporadic grazing. My enthusiasm for "Out of Control" is so complete that I am biased to the point of not being able to find anything wrong with it. I think readers who opine that there is not enough detail are missing the point. This is a personal snapshot of one person's 20-year professional life, not a treatise on the dozen-odd events that she has covered, each of which would require a couple of books to adequately detail. I also think the reader who complains about name dropping also misses the point. This does injustice to Ms. Cockburn's immense talent for using wit, a biting writing style, and a well-earned license for subjectivity to tell a fascinating story.

A page-turning suspense thriller by a superior writer.

Ms Cockburn's recollections of her adventures gives new meaning to the concept of gutsy journalists. She recounts actual events with skill and sensitivity, making even the most hair-raising segements credible and enjoyable. This chronicle has immense appeal for the arm- chair traveler and seasoned veteran of foreign travels alike. The smells, sounds, sights and textures come alive in anecdotes gleaned from her wide-ranging and fearless pursuit of "news" that touches the very elemental core of human experience. What in other, less-skilled writers might be considered "name-dropping," in Cock- burns matter-of-fact style becomes endearing. Chalk one up for an intelligent, fearless profes- sional who is not afraid to deal with hardships and trials of a nomadic existence, while still main- taining ties to family, friends, and colleagues. Read this one and hope for more like it.