John M Hamilton's Top Book Recommendations

John M HamiltonThis is yet another exemplar of an aspect for foreign correspondence. Dorothy Thompson was a passionate, bigger-than-life journalist, married for a while to Sinclair Lewis. In a very brash way – you had to be brash to be a woman working abroad in those days – she relentlessly hounded the head of the Philadelphia Public Ledger’s foreign service – he was based in France – to hire her. He finally... (Source)

John M HamiltonThis is a fun read – a picture of foreign reporting at the end of the 19th century. Creelman wrote for Pulitzer and Hearst. He had adventures, stirred things up and told wonderful stories. Hearst, it appears, sent him to Haiti, where he proposed to the president that his country join the US. This book contains the wonderful canard about Hearst at the end of the 19th century – that he had sent the... (Source)

Elizabeth Perryin some ways it seems the most dated of the books I’ve chosen, because it presents a totally rosy portrait of the Communist revolution. But I think for understanding modern China it’s extremely important. And that’s because it does, in rather sympathetic but comprehensive detail, point out both the importance of the land revolution, and the nationalistic revolution, as key elements in Mao... (Source)

John M HamiltonThis arguably is the most important book by an American foreign correspondent in the 20th century. At the time it was written in the mid-1930s nobody knew who the communists were. Many thought they were mere bandits. Snow went to the north-west of China to find them. When his book came out the whole equation changed; thereafter communism was understood to be a viable political movement. (Source)