Unreasonable Behavior: An Autobiography

By Don McCullin

Book Overview

From the construction of the Berlin Wall through every major conflict of his adult lifetime up to the Syrian Civil War, photographer Don McCullin has left a trail of iconic images. Revised and updated after twenty-five years, Unreasonable Behavior traces the life and career of one of the top photojournalists of the twentieth century and beyond. Born in London in 1935, McCullin worked as a photographer's assistant in the RAF during the Suez Crisis. His early association with a North London gang led to the first publication of his pictures. As an overseas correspondent for the Sunday Times Magazine beginning in 1966, McCullin soon became a new kind of hero, taking a generation of readers beyond the insularity of post-war domestic life through the lens of his Nikon camera. He captured the realities of war in Biafra, the Congo, Vietnam, Cambodia, and the human tragedy of famine and cholera on the Bangladesh border and later, the AIDs epidemic in Sub-Saharan Africa. McCullin now spends his days in a Somerset village, where he photographs the landscape and arranges still-lifes. Harrowing and poignant, Unreasonable Behavior is an extraordinary account of a witness who triumphed over the memories that could have destroyed him.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0802126960
• ISBN13: 9780802126962
• Release Date: June 2017
• Publisher: Grove Press
• Length: 368 Pages
• Weight: 1.35 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.2" x 5.9" x 8.9"

Customer Reviews

His Life That Illustrates Death

I came back to Don McCullin after accidentally coming across a collection of his photos many years ago. A photgraph he took of a starving albino Biafran boy had seared its self into my memory, though at the time I was too wrapped up in my college reading requirements to fully explore his work and autobiography. So five years later, while I couldn't remember McCullin's name, the power of that one picture egged me on until I finally, after digging through the university library's photo section for a few hours, found his books again.The autobiography is amazing because of the incredible story and insanity of McCullin's career. It is all the more extraordinary because of the direct potency of the writing coming from a man who has suffered from dyslexia and generally avoided books. With this work McCullin shows the humanity of war and the morbid destruction thrust upon a people; the surreal insanity that must infect those living with and creating death.With yet another large scale war impending this book is an illustration of the basic humanity that too often gets lost in politics.

Demons and Dirt

This book is more than just a description of one man's life. As one wades through chapter after chapter of Don McCullin's thoughts and reflections, it's plain to see that he is a fighter. From a harsh upbringing in wartime London, to his constant struggle to bring images of conflict and misery into the public eye and his resultant battle against the ghosts of his death-stained past, a theme of conflict courses through the pages of this book like hot blood from a unstaunched bullet wound. Unlike John Simpson's hedonistic autobiography of his life hopping between the earth's hotspots, "Strange Places, Questionable People", McCullin dashes past the glorifying clichés of foreign correspondence and portrays the harsh reality of a life under constant pressure, whether it be the initial social stigma of being of an inferior class within the media sector, the fear experienced as incoming artillery comes whistling towards him, or being locked up in a foreign prison, where death lurks around every corner. This is McCullin's way of exorcising the demons of a life filled with frightful images that most of us merely glance at from time to time, and acknowledges this in the final chapter. Although McCullin does not delve as deep into the psyche as Anthony Loyd's memoir "My War Gone By, I Miss It So", this book rates as being one of the most sincere accounts of life on the front-line as I have experienced.