Shutterbabe: Adventures in Love and War

At age twenty-two, fresh out of college and passionate about photography, Deborah Copaken Kogan moved to Paris and began knocking on photo agency doors, begging to be given a photojournalism assignment. Within weeks, she was on the back of truck in Afghanistan with a huge bag of cameras and film strapped to her tiny frame, the only woman -- and unfortunately, the only journalist -- in a convoy of rebel freedom fighters. She had traveled to Afghanistan with a handsome but dangerously unpredictable Frenchman, and the saga of both their relationship and the assignment is the first of Shutterbabe's six page-turning chapters, each covering a different corner of the globe and each intimately linked to the man Kogan was involved with at the time. From Zimbabwe to Romania, from to Russia to Haiti, Kogan takes her readers on a heartbreaking yet surprisingly hilarious journey through a mine-strewn decade, her personal battles -- sexism, battery, life-threatening danger -- blending seamlessly with the historical ones -- wars, revolutions, unfathomable suffering -- that it was her job to record. Shutterbabe is a thrilling coming-of-age story, told with humor and uncommon wisdom, about how one woman fought her way onto battlefields, and the horrors, truths, and love that she discovered there.