News correspondent Leslie Cockburn has dined with the Cali Cartel, marched with the Khmer Rouge, hunted down the Black Turban in Afghanistan, pursued the Russian mafia to the Arctic Circle, shared pomegranate sauce with the Ayatollahs, and stopped a small Kurdish war, but she has never told these stories in a book-until now.
Cockburn was one of the first women to break into the tight fraternity of combat and third-world reportage when she began work at the London bureau of NBC News in 1976-where successful news gathering required "unorthodox tactics, stamina, and, for best results, a...