Don't Be Afraid of the Bullets by Laura Kasinof

Fortunately for readers, she’s taken those moments and shared them, offering a moving portrait of life as a war correspondent.Īn action-packed account of the civil war in Yemen from a woman who experienced it firsthand. She placed herself in some sketchy situations in hopes of an interview, but her affection for the Yemeni people made her want to stay there and report what she saw to the world. The tensions ran high, as did the adrenaline, which Kasinof admits she became addicted to. In this debut memoir, the author provides vivid details of those years, bringing readers into the heat of the conflicts, into the mosques-turned-hospitals filled with the wounded and dying, and into the sitting rooms where she interviewed some of the most important men in Yemen while they chewed khat leaves together. Suddenly, Kasinof was in the middle of the gunfire, writing news reports for the New York Times and loving (almost) every minute of it. She had no idea that the country would soon become a hotbed of anti-government protests, which escalated into a full-blown war between supporters of the dictator, Ali Abdullah Saleh, and those who wanted him ousted from power.

Having studied Arabic in college, she quickly fell in love with the hospitable people of Yemen and even became a minicelebrity when she played an American in a Yemeni soap opera.

When a friend suggested she move to Yemen, a country that in 2009 seemed safer than Egypt or Syria, the author leapt at the idea. How one woman became a war journalist almost by accident.įed up with life in New York City, where she felt stuck in a rut, 20-something Kasinof longed to go to the Middle East and write freelance articles for a living.

Don't Be Afraid of the Bullets by Laura Kasinof