While her friendships lasted all her life, her love life, the second storyline here, was often chaotic and heartbreaking. In chronicling this unravelling, the book does a wider service, portraying the price paid by many war correspondents, including Colvin, in alcoholism, PTSD and broken relationships. The Indonesians finally allowed everyone safe passage.Īfter she was shot, she suffered from nightmares and drank more and more. Along with two other women journalists, she refused to leave hundreds of refugees behind in a besieged UN compound in East Timor when others fled. As Hilsum writes, she went further and stayed longer than anyone else. Living under fire in Kosovo, crossing snow-covered mountains in Chechnya and hunkering down in Baghdad, Marie Colvin became known for a very personal style of reporting that focused on victims, and her courage and persistence was legendary. After securing an interview with Gadafy, which went global, she switched to the Sunday Times. She wangled a job in journalism and eventually got to Paris with the wire service UPI. 'The mother and the father no like.' She missed the deadline for Yale, but talked her way in, a skill she never lost.

At 13, this American-Irish Catholic wrote that she wore a mini to Mass. Here she marshals not just empathy for her subject, who was also a friend, but investigative and critical skills and damn fine storytelling.Ĭolvin's journals reveal an early independent and rebellious streak. Hilsum, Channel 4’s international editor, has always had buckets of empathy.

She admits that she wondered, uncomfortably, if Colvin was reckless, or she, Hilsum, a coward. Lindsey Hilsum, who has written In Extremis, had eaten dinner with Colvin in Beirut just days before, and decided it was too dangerous to go in.

That was her manifesto, and one the Sunday Times correspondent was still pursuing, wearing her trademark black eye-patch, when she was killed in a rocket attack by Syrian forces in 2012. After war correspondent Marie Colvin was shot in the eye in Sri Lanka, she wrote, “It has always seemed to me that what I write about is humanity in extremis, pushed to the unendurable, and that it is really important to tell people what really happens in wars.”

Marie colvin book in extremis