It's What I Do

The New York Times bestselling memoir by Pulitzer Prize-winning war photojournalist Lynsey Addario "Beautifully written and vividly illustrated . . . Addario is an artist of empathy, a witness not to grand ideas about human sacrifice and suffering, but to human beings, simply being." —The Boston Globe "An unflinching memoir." —The Washington Post A young photojournalist just finding her way, Lynsey Addario is sent to Afghanistan after the attacks of September 11. As she documents the complex lives of the Afghan people, both under Taliban rule and after the U.S. invasion, Addario finds her calling as a war photographer — a calling that will lead her into virtually every major theater of war in the twenty-first century. She photographs the civilian casualties and misunderstood insurgents of the Iraq War, as well as the burned villages and countless dead in Darfur. She exposes a culture of violence against women in the Congo and gets kidnapped by pro-Qaddafi forces in the Libyan civil war. This relentless pursuit of truth shapes Addario's life. As a woman photojournalist, she fights her way into a boys' club of a profession. Rather than choose between her personal life and her career, Addario learns to strike a necessary balance. In the man who will become her husband, she finds at last a real love to complement her work, not take away from it, and as a new mother, she gains an all-the-more intensely personal understanding of the fragility of life. Watching uprisings unfold and people fight to the death for their freedom, Addario understands she is documenting not only news but also the fate of societies. It’s What I Do is more than just a snapshot of life on the front lines; it is witness to the human cost of war.