FIRST TO THE FRONT The Untold Story of Dickey Chapelle, Trailblazing Female War Correspondent

With a story as gripping as this chronicle of a female war correspondent, narrator Kate Handford wisely stays out of the way. She recounts the life of Dickey Chapelle at a steady pace, expressing emotion where appropriate and regularly pausing to let selected passages sink in. Even though this is a biography, not an autobiography, Handford almost becomes Chapelle, whose career took off when she reported from the front of the Pacific Theater during WWII. Later, she spent weeks in solitary confinement in a Hungarian prison run by the Communist secret police, reported on the Algerian independence movement from the inside, wrote about being in Cuba with Fidel Castro, and died while covering Marines in Vietnam. This biography reveals a significant but largely unknown journalist, and Handford does justice to the work. R.C.G. © AudioFile 2023, Portland, Maine [Published: SEPTEMBER 2023]