272. Nicholas D. Kristof with Timothy Egan: A Journey Through Journalism

Town Hall Seattle Arts & Culture Series

Headlines from around the world flash on our television screens and appear on our newsfeeds, but we don’t always know what life is like for journalists who often risk their lives to deliver the news.

New York Times columnist, Pulitzer Prize winner, and bestselling author Nicholas D. Kristof has penned a memoir, Chasing Hope: A Reporter’s Life about his four decades in and out of the newsroom — not only as a reporter but also as a foreign correspondent, bureau chief, and columnist. Since 1984, Kristof has worked almost continuously for the New York Times and has reported from around the globe, crossing cultural and continental lines. Kristof witnessed and wrote about some of the most memorable events in this century: the Tiananmen Square protests and massacre, the Yemeni civil war, the Darfur genocide in Sudan, and the epidemic of addiction that swept through his hometown in rural Oregon and a broad swath of working-class America.

Readers of Chasing Hope will learn about Kristof’s colleagues as well as laymen who impacted his life, such as the dissident whom he helped escape from China and a Catholic nun who browbeat a warlord into releasing kidnapped schoolgirls. Kristof believes that he has seen some of the worst of humanity as well as the best. The memoir details Kristof’s long and eventful career as a journalist and examines ideas of global citizenship forged over a lifetime.

Nicholas D. Kristof is an op-ed columnist for The New York Times, where he was previously bureau chief in Hong Kong, Beijing, and Tokyo. He is the co-author, with his wife, Sheryl WuDunn, of five previous books: Tightrope, A Path Appears, Half the Sky, Thunder from the East, and China Wakes. He was awarded two Pulitzer Prizes, one with WuDunn in 1990 for their coverage of China, and the second in 2006 for his columns on Darfur.

Timothy Egan is a Pulitzer Prize winning reporter and the author of nine other books, most recently the highly acclaimed A Pilgrimage to Eternity and The Immortal Irishman, a New York Times bestseller. His book on the Dust Bowl, The Worst Hard Time, won a National Book Award for Excellence in Nonfiction. His account of photographer Edward Curtis, Short Nights of the Shadow Catcher, won the Carnegie Medal for nonfiction.

Buy the Book Chasing Hope: A Reporter's Life

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