Fighting Words: The bold American Journalists Who Brought The World Home Between The Wars

Today's nonfiction characters are Fighting Words: The bold American Journalists Who Brought The World Home Between The Wars by Nancy F. Cott.  It is 402 pages long and is published by basic books. The cover is blue with an old style spiral notebook in the center. The intended readers is someone who's interested in It has to be, journalistic history, and the lives of four journalists over the course of the 1920s and 30s. There is mild foul language sexuality and discussion of violence in this piece.  There Be Spoilers Ahead.

From the dust jacket-  At a time when print media reign supreme and newspapers were legion, a crop of young Americans impulsively left their homes to reinvent themselves as foreign correspondents. Dorothy Thompson, John Gunther, Vincent Sheehan, Rayna Raphaelson adopted the power of the press as their own as they travel the globe. In the tumultuous decades following the first world war, they confronted political challenges that still reverberate today-  democracy vs authoritarianism, global  responsibility versus isolationism, press  objectivity versus propaganda. By the early 1930s that they were in anti-fascist Vanguard, keenly aware of Hitler's impending Menace, alerting Americans to political urgencies far away. They were recalibrating their intimate lives with lovers and spouses at the same time, navigating sexual passions and frictions. Their experiences trace the development of not only International journalism but also the making of the modern self.

A riveting group portrait of four extraordinary Americans abroad the Golden Age of foreign correspondents, Fighting Words shows how these youthful cosmopolitan's reshaped America's sense of its role in the world.

Review-  An interesting, well-written, in-depth look at the lives of four people I knew absolutely nothing about. Cott gives the reader excellent insight into her four subjects by following them from their childhood to their deaths but the main focus of the book is on their reporting work during the 1920s and 30s. All four traveled the globe, some of them more than once, and they wrote about their experiences and the world that they encountered. With first-hand documents be that their personal journals or articles that they wrote, we see the world that they saw and experience it with them. At times the book can be slow going as there are many details, but in the end I found it very worth my time and I learned quite a bit about American journalism and four of the people who innovated with it. I do wonder why she decided to write one book about these four people instead of concentrating on one as any one of them would make a fascinating biography but that was my only complaint. The writing is engaging and interesting, the people themselves are fascinating, and this is a good non-fiction book.

 I give this book a 4 out of 5 Stars. I get nothing for my review and I borrowed this book from my local library.