Heroes

By the journalist who won the International Reporter of the Year award and the United Nations Association Media Peace Prize, this book brings together the episodes for which his journalism is renowned, analyzing the nature of both these great upheavals and the domestic tragedies he has encountered.

The 'heroes' of John Pilger's narrative are the many ordinary people he has witnessed coping with their lives in difficult and often brutal conditions: dissidents in the Soviet Union; victims of conflicts in Vietnam, Cambodia, Africa, India, the Middle East and Central America. They also include the Irish labouring generation of his great-great-grandfather, transported in irons to Australia for uttering 'unlawful oaths'. It is a vivid, engrossing and sometimes blackly amusing personal story covering the periods for which his journalism is renowned. John Pilger has witnessed many of the major world upheavals of the past thirty years, as well as the daily realities of injustices normally hidden from society's view, and his reporting of these events has always been distinguished by his compassion for the ordinary people caught up in them, and the intense desire to tell the truth.