The off-camera world of a foreign correspondent.
News cowboys - it was the nickname the reporters and camera people at Seven Network's Los Angeles bureau jokingly gave themselves as they headed off on assignments, not knowing what to expect and often unprepared for what they found. It was a way of coping, of not taking too seriously what was often deadly serious, as they witnessed some of the worst moments in recent world history.
For 18 years Mike Amor was one of those journalists. He was on the ground during 9/11 and in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, when so many were abandoned by their own government. He reported on mass shootings from Port Arthur to Sandy Hook, told the sad story of the senseless murder in Oklahoma of young Australian Chris Lane, covered the earthquake in Haiti and the astonishing rescue of a little girl named Winnie, investigated Mexican drug cartels, came under fire in Gaza - and much more. There were good times, too - following the Olympics or Chloë McCardel's record-breaking Cuban swim - but the mental and physical toll was incalculable, on him and on his wife and son.
Mike, who won the prestigious Edward R. Murrow Network Award in 2011, recounts these experiences with honesty, compassion and humour, but also takes on the big questions: Why do foreign correspondents do this job? Why do they, sometimes recklessly, expose themselves to danger when they have family at home? Do they ever stop hearing the cries of injured children or the chirping alarms at the Twin Towers that marked the resting places of dead firefighters under the rubble?
News Cowboys is an extraordinary book, brave, moving and thought-provoking. To read it is to see the world differently and to understand the high price paid by those who will stop at nothing to tell the truth.
