cover image Women of the World: The Great Foreign Correspondents

Women of the World: The Great Foreign Correspondents

Julia Edwards. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (HMH), $17.95 (275pp) ISBN 978-0-395-44486-3

Edwards, a reporter who has worked in some 100 countries, here traces the achievements of women journalists who have covered world news: Margaret Fuller's New York Herald dispatches in 1848 from revolutionary Rome; Louise Bryant in Moscow during World War I; Dorothy Thompson and Anne O'Hare McCormick in Europe in the 1920s; photographer Margaret Bourke-White's daring exploits in World War II; ``Maggie'' Higgins in Korea and others. Military rules and the rigid attitudes of male officers were especially galling to media women during the 1944 liberation of Europe, Edwards notes, but through ingenuity (and actually helped at times by being ousted from a combat zone to a wire-equipped base area) they were able to claim newsbeats during such operations as the D-day landings, the Rhine crossings and the linkup of U.S. and Soviet troops on the Elbe River. The book handily combines exciting adventure stories with a feminist statement. (June)