Love, Africa: A Memoir of Romance, War, and Survival

A journalist juggles a relationship and overseas adventure in this hectic memoir. Pulitzer Prize–winning New York Times correspondent Gettleman recounts his dangerous reporting from global hot spots: interviewing Taliban POWs in Afghanistan; surveying firefights and suicide-bomb carnage in Iraq; and exploring famines, insurgencies, tribal massacres, and a pirate café in East Africa, where he is the Times bureau chief. Sharing many of his exploits is his wife and sometime colleague Courtenay; their star-crossed relationship, including bouts of infidelity, complicates his wanderlust. Gettleman’s narrative has the virtues and limitations of journalism; it’s colorful, evocative and immediate, but also distracted and somewhat shapeless. Many episodes are riveting: Gettleman was abducted by Iraqi insurgents (he escaped by pretending to be Greek instead of American), and he and Courtenay accompanied Ogaden rebels on a gruelling desert trek only to be thrown in prison by Ethiopian soldiers. Unfortunately, the storm-tossed-romance theme feels inflated; it bogs down in bickering between Gettleman and Courtenay, and sometimes entices the author into purplish prose (one illicit tryst in Baghdad “[left] a wet spot on the sheets as blood settled into pools out on the streets”). Africa definitely feels like the more compelling of Gettleman’s passions, rendered here in engrossing reportage. (May)