FLIRTING WITH DANGER: Confessions of a Reluctant War Reporter

The words "love" and "disaster" should have found their way into this illuminating but uneven memoir's title: in her account of her years as a CNN correspondent in flash points around the world, Darrow is nearly always in (or searching for) the former and nearly always on the brink of the latter. Darrow covered civil wars in Georgia and Chechnya, the Soviet "dis-Union" of the early 1990s and the troubles in Northern Ireland, and did so with remarkable, bullet-dodging courage; she also found herself struggling with difficult family relationships and a host of lamentable boyfriends. Sometimes such strikingly different subjects don't fit comfortably into a single narrative, but Darrow tries admirably (if not always successfully) to explain each in terms of the other. Russia in the 1980s "felt like one giant dysfunctional family. I was perfectly at home there," she writes; later, in the Balkans, she muses that it may have been because of the dynamics in her own family "that I felt so drawn to trying to understand the less popular views [such as those of the Serbs] around the world." Darrow's tale contains plenty of similar and mawkish revelations, but it also offers memorable snapshots of life on the front lines: when Yeltsin's tanks shoot missiles at the Parliament building in Moscow in October 1993, women pushing strollers stopped to watch the fireworks; hospitable Georgian rebels called temporary cease-fires to feed CNN reporters; Darrow herself got a spa manicure while listening to exploding shells in the Croatian streets. These moments are the book's best—they feel sharp and real, on the one hand, and on the other, they're a lot less familiar than the usual workaholic's quest for love and inner peace. (Jan. 8)