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Books about Catherine Leroy

CLOSE UP ON WAR — THE PIONEERING PHOTOJOURNALIST CATHERINE LEROY IN VIETNAM by Mary Cronk Farrell

Close Up On War tells the story of a young Parisian woman who overcame gender and professional barriers to take groundbreaking battlefront
photographs during the Vietnam War. Inspired by pictures published in French newspapers and magazines and determined to witness and record
the unfolding action, Catherine Leroy followed the advice of iconic combat photographer Robert Capa: Get close! At the age of 21,
she arrived in Saigon in February 1966 as a freelancer, forging ahead despite her lack of experience. The book is a detailed account of Leroy’s
achievements that leaves the reader marveling at her sheer determination, bravery, and disregard for her own safety as she documented
what was happening in Vietnam. It is illustrated with over forty of her powerful photographs. The preface and the introduction are by two
Vietnam War Pulitzer Prize winning journalists, Nick Ut and Peter Arnett respectively.

A former television journalist, Mary Cronk Farrell now writes acclaimed award-winning books for children and young adults that tell the stories
of little-known women whose strength and courage helped shape history. She resides in Washington State in the United States.

YOU DON’T BELONG HERE, HOW THREE WOMEN REWROTE THE STORY OF WAR by Elizabeth Becker

Catherine Leroy, a French daredevil photographer, Frances FitzGerald, a blue-blood American intellectual, and Kate Webb, a New-Zealander/Australian
iconoclast, arrived in Vietnam with starkly different life experiences but one shared purpose: to report on the most consequential story of the decade.
At a time when women were considered unfit to be foreign reporters, Frankie, Catherine and Kate paid their own way to war, arrived without jobs,
challenged the rules imposed on them by the military, ignored the belittlement and resentment of their male peers, and
found new ways to explain the war through the people who lived through it.

In You Don’t Belong Here, Elizabeth Becker uses these women’s careers and lives to illuminate the Vietnam War from the 1965 American buildup
through the Tet Offensive, the expansion into Cambodia, the American defeat, and its aftermath. Arriving herself in the last years of the war,
Becker writes as an historian and a witness to what these women accomplished. What emerges is an unforgettable story of three journalists
forging their place in a land of men, often at great personal sacrifice, and forever altering the craft of war reportage for generations.
Deeply reported and filled with personal letters, interviews, and profound insight, You Don’t Belong Here fills a void in the history of women and of war.

Elizabeth Becker is an award-winning journalist and author who began her career as a war correspondent for the Washington Post in Cambodia
in the late 1960s and early 1970s. She later became the senior foreign editor for National Public Radio and a New York Times correspondent
covering national security and foreign policy. She has been the recipient of numerous awards including accolades from the Overseas Press Club,
DuPont Columbia’s Awards and was a member of the Times team that won the 2002 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service for covering 9/11.
She is the author of When the War was Over: Cambodia and the Khmer Rouge Revolution, the definitive book on the event that has been in print
for twenty years.

Books by Catherine Leroy

UNDER FIRE

Compiled and edited by Catherine Leroy, Under Fire pairs her own work and that of 15 other daring combat photographers of the Vietnam War –
among them David Burnett, Larry Burrows, Gilles Caron, Henri Huet, Don McCullin, Kyoichi Sawada and Nick Ut – with essays from an equally
remarkable roster of writers including Philip Caputo, Jean-Claude Guillebaud, David Halberstam, Wayne Karlin, Jean Lacouture, Tim O’Brien and
Neil Sheehan. With a foreword by Senator John McCain — a pilot and prisoner of war in Vietnam — and an epilogue by Fred Ritchin, the book is a
potent, often poignant reminder of the men and women whose work helped forge the collective memory of an era.

“The unparalleled access to the war in Vietnam made it possible for a generation of photojournalists to live with a unique sense of urgency,” Leroy
writes in her preface. “With cameras they made a difference, giving war a face even when it dragged on and no one seemed to pay attention
anymore. We are left with photography even more powerful today than when it captured the fractured moments of chaos. Now it’s history.”

GOD CRIED

After three years in Vietnam (1966/1968), Catherine Leroy took her cameras to other areas of conflict around the world — Afghanistan,
Cyprus, Iran and in Africa. Her coverage of the civil war in Lebanon won her in 1976 the Overseas Press Club of America’s ‘Robert Capa Gold
Medal’—making her the first woman to obtain the prestigious award. In the summer of 1982, Leroy covered the siege of West Beirut following
the military invasion of Lebanon by neighboring Israel.

Australian journalist Tony Clifton who worked for the American weekly magazine Newsweek for thirty years and Leroy who was then
freelancing for the rival Time magazine — they had initially met in Vietnam — followed the Palestinians and their allies and closely recorded
the strife that ravaged the small Middle-Eastern country since the early seventies culminating in three-month siege and the subsequent
massacres the of Palestinians by Christian Phalange militia in the Sabra and Shatila neighborhood and refugee camp.
In 1983, they co-authored the controversial book, God Cried, published in the UK by Quartet Book.