Shutterbabe: Adventures in Love and War - Softcover

Kogan, Deborah Copaken

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1840185953 ISBN 13: 9781840185959

Publisher: Mainstream Publishing, 2002

Synopsis

On a wintery night in February 1989, 22 year-old Deborah Copaken Kogan entered Afganistan as the only female in a group of Afghan freedom fighters. She had come to photograph the Soviet pull-out. This is a memoir of a young woman finding and fighting her way through the war zones of the world. Told with humour, it tells how one woman fought her way onto battlefields, and the danger, pain, truths and love she discovered there.

About this title

From the Publisher:

Suggested Reading
Anne Frank’s The Diary of Anne Frank was the first book to whack me over the head. J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye was the second. As a teenager, I loved Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird, George Orwell’s Animal Farm and William Golding’s The Lord of the Flies. In college, my favorite book was On the Road. If you can find a copy of Robert Frank’s The Americans, I suggest you read Kerouac’s words while flipping through Frank’s pictures.

Other memoirs worth reading, the first of which should be required reading in all schools everywhere: Primo Levi’s Survival in Auschwitz (a.k.a. If This is a Man), Ernest Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast, Frank McCourt’s Angela’s Ashes, Mary Karr’s The Liar’s Club, Tobias Wolff’s This Boy’s Life, Anthony Lloyd’s My War Gone By I Miss it So.

My fiction hit list: Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, Philip Roth’s The Counterlife, Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita, Gustav Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, William Styron’s Sophie’s Choice, Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway.

If you’re looking for good photography books, try anything by Henri Cartier-Bresson, Gilles Peress’ Telex Iran, Sebastiao Salgado’s Workers, Diane Arbus’ Diane Arbus: An Aperture Mongraph, Luc Delahaye’s Winterreise, and Jane Evelyn Atwood’s Too Much Time: Women in Prison. These will at least get you started.

Finally, there is no way I would have been able to write this book had I not read Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird.

From the Inside Flap:

protagonist in that age-old tale—boy goes to war, comes back a man—were a female? Shutterbabe, Deborah Copaken Kogan's remarkable debut, is just that: the story of a twenty-two-year-old girl from Potomac, Maryland, who goes off to photograph wars and comes back, four years and one too many adventures later, a woman.

In 1988, fresh out of Harvard, Kogan moved to Paris with a small backpack, a couple of cameras, the hubris of a superhero, and a strong thirst for danger. She wanted to see what a war would look like when seen from up close, to immerse herself in a world where the gun is God. Naïvely, she figured it would be easy to filter death through the prism of her wide-angle lens.
        
She was dead wrong.

Within weeks of arriving in Paris, after knocking on countless photo agency doors and begging to be sent where the action was, Kogan found herself on the back of a truck in Afghanistan, her tiny frame

About this edition

• Publisher: Mainstream Publishing
• Publication date: 2002
• ISBN 10: 1840185953
• ISBN 13: 9781840185959
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 272