Bearings; A Foreign Correspondent's Life Behind the Lines

New York, N.Y.: The Viking Press, 1978. Presumed First Edition, First printing thus. Hardcover. Good/Good. xvii, [3], 316 pages. Some wear to dust jacket edges. Front board weak and restrengthened with glue. Includes Acknowledgments and Introduction. Topics cover include A Passage to India; Peshawar; This One, 1 Frame; The Train to Ain-Sefra; Anyone Here been Raped and speaks English:; Algeria II, China; Hong Kong, Macao, Vietnam; Vietnam; Tet 1968; Single Gentlemen Preferred; Getting There is Half the Fun; Up the Street and Around the Corner. Edward Samuel Behr (7 May 1926 in Paris - 27 May 2007 in Paris) was a foreign correspondent and war journalist, who worked for many years for Newsweek. In the late 1950s and early 1960s often covered the fighting in the Congo, the civil war in Lebanon as well as the Indo-Chinese border clashes of 1962. In 1958 he published The Algerian Problem. It was considered a fair assessment of a problem. The book was said to be compulsory reading at the United States Department of State. In 1965 he went to Newsweek, the weekly news magazine owned by the Washington Post Company. Operating from Hong Kong as Asia bureau chief, Behr wrote on China's Cultural Revolution, secured an interview with Mao Zedong and reported from Vietnam. The year 1968 turned out to be a hectic one for Behr: he was in Saigon during the Tet offensive, in Paris for the student riots and in Prague when it was occupied by the Russians. In 1978 he published his memoirs. Memorably entitled Anyone Here Been Raped and Speaks English?, it was retitled more blandly for the American market as Bearings: A Foreign Correspondent's Life Behind the Lines. In the nearly thirty years as a reporter that have taken Edward Behr from India to China, Vietnam, Paris, and nearly all points in between, Edward Behr has never lost his cool or compassion, his sense of humor, or his strong admiration for fellow craftsmen, living and dead. With this book, he has created a memoir overflowing with anecdote and adventure--it is vivid, witty, and absolutely unforgettable.