The Face of War

The American journalist Martha Gellhorn witnessed the largest military clashes of the 20th century: from the Spanish Civil War to World War II, from the Soviet-Finnish War to the Arab-Israeli War, from the American invasion of Vietnam to conflicts in... El Salvador and Nicaragua in the 1980s. Despising the lies of official press releases, Gellhorn plunged into the thick of it everywhere, communicating with soldiers, the wounded, and refugees, and wrote about what war looks like for ordinary people caught in its grinding wheels. The author's collection of reports "The Face of War," covering almost fifty years of bloodshed and failed attempts to establish lasting peace, is a sharp, slap-like statement about the state of humanity, not at all outdated in the next half-century.