Bullets and Bylines

War reporters tend to die younger than other journalists, because they work every day in some of the most violent places on earth. Shyam Bhatia is one of the lucky ones who lived to tell the tale. His survival stories include an eyewitness view of a small massacre on the Kabul to Kandahar highway, followed by his own detention, torture and daily threats of execution at the hands of the Mujahideen.

His time in Afghanistan was followed by another chilling episode in southern Sudan, where his media convoy drove over a carefully hidden landmine. One colleague was killed and several others were injured.

The book is just as gripping when Bhatia describes uncovering mass murders in Delhi in 1984 and breaking the story of the Israeli-Egyptian peace treaty. He also writes about meeting the besieged Marsh Arabs of Iraq, work that won him the Foreign Journalist of the Year award. Along the way he recalls encounters with figures such as Yasser Arafat and Benazir Bhutto, before she came to power in Pakistan.

This first-hand account of a foreign correspondent's life is full of drama and danger, and also of absorbing and sometimes hilarious anecdotes. It also gives a close look at late-twentieth-century history as it unfolded in the war zones of South Asia and the Middle East.