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Title: Ricochet
Subtitle: Two Women War Reporters and a Friendship Under Fire
Author: Mary Jo McConahay
Narrator: Betsy Baker
Format: Unabridged
Length: 1 hr and 41 mins
Language: English
Release date: 10-30-15
Publisher: Audible Studios
Genres: History, American
Publisher's Summary:
When three colleagues die violently during a single wartime election day in Central America, two female journalists, best friends, are hurled into a torrent of change in their personal and professional lives and in their relationship with each other. The author, bedeviled by stress and feelings of abandonment, hangs on by her fingernails to reporting while her dear friend "just can't take another picture of a dead body" and throws herself into teaching photography to children who live in a garbage dump. Big questions quietly roil their lives - what is our responsibility to history? To individuals? - until, unexpectedly, they approach an answer together when a child from the dump goes missing.
Mary Jo McConahay is the author of Maya Roads, One Woman's Journey Among the People of the Rainforest. She is an award-winning journalist and documentary filmmaker whose coverage of war, politics, and international justice issues over three decades has appeared in Time, Newsweek, the Los Angeles Times, Vogue, Rolling Stone, and dozens of other newspapers and magazines. Also a believer in writing "deep travel", weaving local history and voices into narrative, she is the current Lowell Thomas Travel Journalist of the Year, a distinction considered equivalent to the Pulitzer Prize in the genre. Maya Roads' awards include the Northern California Book Award for Best Nonfiction Book, National Geographic Traveler Book of the Month, Society of American Travel Writers Grand Award, Independent Publisher's Award for Best Travel Essay Book, Los Angeles BookNews International Book Awards for Best New Nonfiction Book, Best Travel Essay Book, and Best Memoir/Autobiography.
This is a short audiobook originally published as an ebook by Shebooks - high quality fiction, memoir, and journalism for women, by women.
Members Reviews:
Tense, Gritty, and Full of Humanity.
"The plane banked over the surf, came in low over khaki sand, and hit the runway with a single bump, rolling to a stop under the familiar welcome sign..."
With that opening line, Mary Jo McConahay drops us into 1989 El Salvador and, in a tense, urgent narrative, propels us through the war ravaged streets of a Central America in utter turmoil. Many dramas and many themes unfold throughout the story. There's the two American women journalists, one working in words, the other in film, mired in the external war while fighting a war of their own for respect and validation. There are the innocent victims, the common people whose impoverished lives are made even more insufferable by the ongoing horrors of warring factions that have no concern for residual casualties. Corruption, yes, and political intrigue, but told from the human perspective, that of the people suffering or the observers of those who have suffered.
McConahay does an excellent job conveying the journalist perspective. We're there with her in the field. We understand the pressure to get the story and somehow put human emotion on a back burner because the emotion must find it's proper target in the reader. She tells us of the stories that must remain untold because her male colleagues just don't get it:
"Our colleagues, mostly men, seemed to be less interested in what happened to women and children caught in the landscape we covered.
