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A Brutally Honest Exploration of What It Means to Be a War Reporter

In “No Ordinary Assignment,” the correspondent Jane Ferguson is candid about the fears and frustrations that come with her calling.

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By Elizabeth Becker

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NO ORDINARY ASSIGNMENT: A Memoir , by Jane Ferguson

“Afghanistan was the Vietnam of our era,” Jane Ferguson writes in her memoir, “No Ordinary Assignment.” She sees her generation of reporters as descendants of the men and women who covered the first war the United States lost to a largely rural Asian nation. In both cases, America had the overwhelming military advantage of a superpower’s arsenal and the political disadvantage of a superpower’s hubris.

The similarities end there. Ferguson and her 21st-century colleagues have had to navigate a world of wars far more complex and often more deadly than the ones that came before. By comparison, the war that journalists covered in Vietnam, while dangerous, resembled World War II set-piece battles.

Still, Ferguson always held her predecessors up as models. Her memoir is an engrossing chronicle of the costs and rewards of becoming like the women she saw delivering news of skirmishes and revolutions on TV. That Ferguson would become a war reporter who epitomizes this era is one of the anomalies of this compelling book.

She was born on the periphery of Europe in 1984 and raised on a grim farm in Northern Ireland during the final years of the Troubles. Her Protestant upbringing was marked by passages through Army checkpoints and occasional attacks on the village police station. Her indignation over the Troubles was easier to tamp down than her feelings of fear and anxiety at home, where her father withheld his affections and her mother’s volatile anger seemed “to center around a deep hatred of her children.”

Rather than rebel with drugs or escape to the bright lights of Belfast, Ferguson concentrated her considerable energy on school and field hockey. She also sought refuge with her Aunt Fanny, who lived in a serene cottage on the nearby County Down coast. Fanny encouraged her niece’s curiosity as she pored over the memoirs of war correspondents like Kate Adie. Ferguson recalls gathering with her family to hear Orla Guerin and Moira Stuart deliver the latest from conflict zones around the world. “All the men watched and listened in a way I knew they never would have listened to me over dinner,” she writes.

After a post-college internship at the BBC went nowhere, Aunt Fanny sent Ferguson a check for $4,500 and an admonition: “Please use this for something fun.” Ferguson’s idea of fun was studying Arabic in Yemen. She landed in Sana in 2007, at the age of 23, when the country was largely at peace. Then on to Dubai, where she took a job as an assistant sports editor at The Gulf News, an English-language daily, and settled into the Emirati expat life of air-conditioned skyscrapers, chic nightclubs and luxury cars.

While on assignment at a Mazda car dealership the spell broke. Wars were being fought across the Persian Gulf. “I couldn’t hide from the reality that I was living a life I did not want to live anymore,” she writes. What happened to the young girl admiring the women who brought the news from Rwanda and Yugoslavia to her Irish living room? Ferguson drove directly to the airport, parked her Porsche and bought a ticket to Afghanistan.

A few days before a chaperoned trip to a British military base in Kandahar — her desultory first outing — she interviewed Tim Page, the legendary Vietnam War photographer. The elder Page lectured the newbie about the emptiness of most war reporting, with its emphasis on the bang-bang and the view from military vehicles. Humanity comes first. He urged her to “put a face on this war of the Afghan suffering.” Page’s advice became her lodestar over the next decade.

In Afghanistan, Ferguson was on her own. The financial rout of the news business in the early 2000s meant staff foreign correspondent posts were rare. She joined the coterie of freelance reporters willing to work in war zones without proper pay, health insurance or benefits and distinguished herself by specializing in the most dangerous or obscure conflicts. She arrived in Somalia a few months after two reporters had been kidnapped, operating her own camera as a “solo, self-shooting one-woman band.” Soon she was filing regular, hair-raising stories for CNN, not just from Somalia, but Sudan and Yemen too. She worked for such little pay she had to sleep on friends’ sofas. After a year and a half, a new foreign editor arrived and abruptly cut Ferguson from the network’s freelance roster.

Ferguson was angry, but undeterred. In 2012, working with Al Jazeera, she pulled off a career-defining assignment covering the civil war in Syria. The rebel stronghold of Homs was under constant shelling by the forces of Bashar al-Assad. Mosques broadcast calls for blood types from their minarets. Somehow Ferguson was smuggled into the city and emerged safely with an exclusive series on the inhumanity of that siege. Other reporters followed her, including Marie Colvin from The Times of London. Assad’s soldiers, under orders to kill journalists, discovered Colvin’s hide-out — the same apartment where Ferguson had stayed — and murdered her.

Ferguson was occasionally hindered because she was female. Institutional bans against women on the battlefield were lifted decades earlier, largely during Vietnam, but cultural biases persisted. After she survived a deadly Taliban attack on the Serena Hotel restaurant in Kabul, an executive producer pulled her out of the country and replaced her with a male colleague. (“Don’t be all feminist about it,” she was told.)

What truly held her back, Ferguson suggests, was television’s unwritten rule favoring attractive women for on-air reports. “ I will never be known for my beauty ,” she recalls thinking after CNN punted her. I let out a small scream when I read the solution she came up with years later. In 2017, the fearless war correspondent suffered through two black eyes, swollen cheeks, a bloodied nose and a swollen lip, the result of a cosmetic surgery that cost her entire savings.

She managed to dodge injury in Somalia, Afghanistan, Egypt and Palestine even as she kept taking risks. Her descriptions are carefully rendered; the stories never blur into each other. In northern Yemen, she was the only journalist to breach an air, sea and land blockade to report on the humanitarian disaster that Saudi Arabia created with American complicity. In Cairo, she fled gunfire and followed a tip into an ornate mosque that had been converted into a morgue where shrouded corpses lay across crimson carpets. In Somalia, the presence of armed African Union peacekeepers served as a reminder of that country’s long history of conflict and set up a scene in a makeshift Mogadishu hospital: Ferguson, filming a baby as he died on a hospital bed with his mother beside him.

It was here that she understood the futility that comes with war reporting. “To stand in a hospital with a camera and not a stethoscope,” she writes, “is grotesque.”

Ferguson did eventually reach the highest rungs of her profession. In 2019, she won an Emmy and a George Polk Award for her reporting from Yemen. As a special correspondent for PBS and a contributor to The New Yorker, she covered the U.S. evacuation from Afghanistan and the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

What raises “No Ordinary Assignment” above many other memoirs is the way it shows Ferguson’s refusal to take shortcuts in her reporting. She fully lived her stories, experiencing the wars with the people she covered and writing with the kind of intimate knowledge that is prized by novelists and historians. To understand the alchemy she achieved, start with her stories from Yemen. That country has burrowed deep in her bones.

Elizabeth Becker is the author of “You Don’t Belong Here: How Three Women Rewrote the Story of War” and a winner of the Sperber Book Prize and Harvard’s Goldsmith Book Prize.

NO ORDINARY ASSIGNMENT: A Memoir | By Jane Ferguson | Illustrated | 320 pp. | Mariner Books | $29.99

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NO ORDINARY ASSIGNMENT

by Jane Ferguson ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 11, 2023

A captivating, honest, and powerful attempt to do justice to the hardest stories to tell.

An award-winning war reporter recounts her remarkable career in some of the most dangerous places on the planet.

Ferguson begins in Northern Ireland during the Troubles. Her childhood was marked by cold, anxious tension within her family and her country. However, this “stint on high alert” primed her for a career built through grit, moxie, and substantial risk: reporting from the epicenters of some of the most catastrophic conflicts of our time—in Afghanistan, Yemen, Somalia, Syria, Ukraine, and more. With vivid details and pointed reflection, her memoir draws readers into the world of war that exists beyond the “bang bang” of most news coverage. Chronicling her journey on bumpy mountain roads and through tense military checkpoints, embedding with soldiers and visiting makeshift field hospitals, Ferguson clearly demonstrates the devastating, oft-overlooked impact of war on civilians from every side. “There are always so many more,” she writes, “who suffer and die due to the unintended consequences of conflict: the collapse of economies and governments, and with these failures, the chances for any decent public health—sanitation, nutrition, or medical care.” She is an expert storyteller, conveying the fear and anxiety of her many harrowing close calls and the heartbreak of so many of her personal interviews. Her story of building a career in war reporting has an equally powerful arc, as she shows how she went from feeling like an impostor, plagued by doubt and shame, to a quietly confident professional. The author also goes beyond any adrenaline-junkie stereotype with frank rumination that grants space to grapple with heart-wrenching emotional confrontations as well as the moral complexities of her own role. While acknowledging the particularities of being a woman in her position, including the prevalence of double standards, she does not allow herself to be reduced to them.

Pub Date: July 11, 2023

ISBN: 9780063272248

Page Count: 336

Publisher: Mariner Books

Review Posted Online: April 6, 2023

Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2023

BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | CURRENT EVENTS & SOCIAL ISSUES | SURVIVORS & ADVENTURERS | WORLD | INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS | ISSUES & CONTROVERSIES

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New York Times Bestseller

by Stephanie Johnson & Brandon Stanton illustrated by Henry Sene Yee ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 12, 2022

A blissfully vicarious, heartfelt glimpse into the life of a Manhattan burlesque dancer.

A former New York City dancer reflects on her zesty heyday in the 1970s.

Discovered on a Manhattan street in 2020 and introduced on Stanton’s Humans of New York Instagram page, Johnson, then 76, shares her dynamic history as a “fiercely independent” Black burlesque dancer who used the stage name Tanqueray and became a celebrated fixture in midtown adult theaters. “I was the only black girl making white girl money,” she boasts, telling a vibrant story about sex and struggle in a bygone era. Frank and unapologetic, Johnson vividly captures aspects of her former life as a stage seductress shimmying to blues tracks during 18-minute sets or sewing lingerie for plus-sized dancers. Though her work was far from the Broadway shows she dreamed about, it eventually became all about the nightly hustle to simply survive. Her anecdotes are humorous, heartfelt, and supremely captivating, recounted with the passion of a true survivor and the acerbic wit of a weathered, street-wise New Yorker. She shares stories of growing up in an abusive household in Albany in the 1940s, a teenage pregnancy, and prison time for robbery as nonchalantly as she recalls selling rhinestone G-strings to prostitutes to make them sparkle in the headlights of passing cars. Complemented by an array of revealing personal photographs, the narrative alternates between heartfelt nostalgia about the seedier side of Manhattan’s go-go scene and funny quips about her unconventional stage performances. Encounters with a variety of hardworking dancers, drag queens, and pimps, plus an account of the complexities of a first love with a drug-addled hustler, fill out the memoir with personality and candor. With a narrative assist from Stanton, the result is a consistently titillating and often moving story of human struggle as well as an insider glimpse into the days when Times Square was considered the Big Apple’s gloriously unpolished underbelly. The book also includes Yee’s lush watercolor illustrations.

Pub Date: July 12, 2022

ISBN: 978-1-250-27827-2

Page Count: 192

Publisher: St. Martin's

Review Posted Online: July 27, 2022

BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | ENTERTAINMENT, SPORTS & CELEBRITY | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR

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LOVE, PAMELA

by Pamela Anderson ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 31, 2023

A juicy story with some truly crazy moments, yet Anderson's good heart shines through.

The iconic model tells the story of her eventful life.

According to the acknowledgments, this memoir started as "a fifty-page poem and then grew into hundreds of pages of…more poetry." Readers will be glad that Anderson eventually turned to writing prose, since the well-told anecdotes and memorable character sketches are what make it a page-turner. The poetry (more accurately described as italicized notes-to-self with line breaks) remains strewn liberally through the pages, often summarizing the takeaway or the emotional impact of the events described: "I was / and still am / an exceptionally / easy target. / And, / I'm proud of that ." This way of expressing herself is part of who she is, formed partly by her passion for Anaïs Nin and other writers; she is a serious maven of literature and the arts. The narrative gets off to a good start with Anderson’s nostalgic memories of her childhood in coastal Vancouver, raised by very young, very wild, and not very competent parents. Here and throughout the book, the author displays a remarkable lack of anger. She has faced abuse and mistreatment of many kinds over the decades, but she touches on the most appalling passages lightly—though not so lightly you don't feel the torment of the media attention on the events leading up to her divorce from Tommy Lee. Her trip to the pages of Playboy , which involved an escape from a violent fiance and sneaking across the border, is one of many jaw-dropping stories. In one interesting passage, Julian Assange's mother counsels Anderson to desexualize her image in order to be taken more seriously as an activist. She decided that “it was too late to turn back now”—that sexy is an inalienable part of who she is. Throughout her account of this kooky, messed-up, enviable, and often thrilling life, her humility (her sons "are true miracles, considering the gene pool") never fails her.

Pub Date: Jan. 31, 2023

ISBN: 9780063226562

Page Count: 256

Publisher: Dey Street/HarperCollins

Review Posted Online: Dec. 5, 2022

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2023

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REVIEW: No Ordinary Assignment by Jane Ferguson

From award-winning journalist Jane Ferguson, an unflinching memoir of ambition and war—from the Troubles to the fall of Kabul. In Northern Ireland in the 1980s and ‘90s, war was a secret, and young Jane Ferguson wanted to know the truth. For her, war was called the Troubles, bomb threats and military checkpoints on the way to school were commonplace, and an uncle’s gunshot wound in IRA crossfire was disguised as a cow kick. Jane developed a penchant for asking questions that cut through this culture of silence, while the unspoken tension in her village exploded into abuse and rage at home. An opportunity to study Arabic in Yemen after college came as a great relief, a ticket to a different, adventurous life—and to the very center of the story. Ferguson has since reported from nearly every war front around the globe—from Yemen and Syria during the Arab Spring, Afghanistan during the fall of Kabul, and Ukraine during Russia’s 2022 invasion—but her rise to the highest ranks of journalism has been anything but ordinary. As a scrappy one-woman reporting team, a borrowed camera her only equipment, networks often told her she simply had the wrong accent, even the wrong appearance. Still, her ambition to build a life in journalism on her own terms thrust her into harm’s way time and again. While other reporters chased “bang bang shoot ‘em up” stories, a different set of questions guided Ferguson’s work, ones that gave faces and names to the people experiencing these conflicts. In the face of grave violence and suffering, giving voice to civilian lives seemed a small act of justice, no matter the risks. For fans of Samantha Power, Marie Colvin, and Ariel Levy, Ferguson’s bold debut chronicles her unlikely journey from bright, inquisitive child to intrepid war correspondent from the front lines of the most dangerous conflicts and dire humanitarian crises of our time. With an open-hearted humanity we rarely see in conflict stories, No Ordinary Assignment shows what it means to build an authentic career against the odds.

I often find myself interested in reading autobiographies or memoirs of people doing things that I would or could never do. This is one of them. Jane Ferguson takes readers from her childhood in Northern Ireland with difficult (to put it mildly) parents through her years establishing herself in a job she knew she was born to do – finding ways to get to and report on war torn areas of the world and then get back home alive.

Anxiety – from living in The Troubles with the clashes of British soldiers and IRA gunmen plus bombs going off – follows Jane as she spends a scholarship year at a prestigious US boarding school, earns money at a chicken plant (CW- graphic), then Uni in York before finally traveling to Yemen to learn Arabic and fall in love with the country. None of that, though, would get her the job she coveted as a journalist.

It’s her own hustling and busking that lands her a cushy job in Dubai before she chucks it all by getting caught doing a side-hustle for another network. Al Jazeera English sends her to war torn Syria and Cairo (CW- Graphic) among other places before a shift in management coverage convinces her to quit. From then on, she must ferret out possible stories and angles then sell a network on paying her for her story. She makes a name for herself going to places that few others will, mostly based on local contacts who can help her past authorities determined to bar journalists.

It takes a certain type of person to feel the urge and answer the call to shine a light on what is going on in places where people are shooting at you and bombs are going off. Ferguson had that drive from early in her life when she saw that female journalists were among the few women to whom men would (sometimes) listen. To do her job, she often had to push down her (natural) fears and anxiety and deal with imposter syndrome. She also details an up-and-down romantic relationship as well as her love for various places such as Beirut, Sana’a, and Kabul.

As a blonde Westerner, she was often approached by people who wanted to show her things and tell her their truths which few other networks would cover. Jane was mainly interested in the people on the street rather than the “bang bang.” She does some soul searching and introspection about why she felt driven to do this job and fights with despair that she didn’t do the situations and people justice. The book is an intense first hand view of a job I couldn’t do and the toll it sometimes takes on those who do. B

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Another long time reader who read romance novels in her teens, then took a long break before started back again about 25 years ago. She enjoys historical romance/fiction best, likes contemporaries, action- adventure and mysteries, will read suspense if there's no TSTL characters and is currently reading more fantasy and SciFi.

My admiration for Jane Ferguson is miles high. Every single report from her is timely, shattering and essential to any understanding of global conflicts and the people most affected. Is this a difficult book to read, Jayne? I feel duty bound to honor her story, but wonder if I’m brave enough. Thanks.

@ Darlynne : Depending on your views of poultry be cautious about one page in particular regarding her time working before going to Uni. But be *very* cautious about her reports regarding her time in Syria and Egypt. What she gives details about lasts only a page or two in each instance but … yeah, she doesn’t hold back and it’s horrible. She also talks about her later time in Sana’a when the lack of food was beginning to cause starvation. You can kind of anticipate when these moments are going to occur though and if you can skim ahead a page or two, I think you can make it.

Oh and her parents are pieces of work. Each one in a different way. That is more woven through her account of her childhood and if anyone has suffered parental (emotional) abuse, I’d skip those sections.

Thanks for the warnings. I should read this.

@ Darlynne : Bonne chance my friend. It is worth reading.

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No Ordinary Assignment by Jane Ferguson

Brendan’s alternate tagline for no ordinary assignment:.

Safety? Sounds boring.

Quick synopsis:

The story of war journalist, Jane Ferguson.

Fact for Non-History People:

Sana’a, Yemen, is believed to be the one of the oldest continuously inhabited cities in the world.

Fact for History Nerds:

The Somali language wasn’t formally written down until the 1970s.

My Take on No Ordinary Assignment:

Memoirs can be the trickiest of non-fiction categories to write. Write something which is too meek, and you may sound like a phony. Write something too boastful and you sound arrogant. Then, the challenge of how to tell stories which sometime don’t connect perfectly into a cohesive whole. Jane Ferguson’s No Ordinary Assignment masterfully avoids all these pitfalls by being honest and insightful while recognizing just how insane some of these experiences are.

I can’t think of many books whose first chapters are so amazingly told. Jane’s examination of her youth in Northern Ireland during the Troubles sets the tone perfectly. Jane reveals herself as someone who knows where her drive and quirks come from. When chapter one finished, I thought, “I know why this person would go on to do what she does.” The last chapter about the fall of Kabul could probably be its own book. It is the culmination of all the chapters before and a fitting finish to this memoir even though Jane has a lot more life to live.

The chapters between these bookends (pun intended!) are uniformly excellent. The key for me is Jane’s view of herself. She sees her (sometimes imagined) shortcomings and isn’t afraid to point them out and own them. Conversely, she is not so humble as to deny that it takes real courage to do what she did. It’s a must read.

(This book was provided as an advance copy by Netgalley and Mariner Books.)

A fantastic book for all audiences. Buy it here!

If You Liked This Try:

• Jennette McCurdy, I’m Glad My Mom Died
• Mike Rinder, A Billion Years

Brendan Dowd

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No Ordinary Assignment

by Jane Ferguson

• On Sale: 07/11/2023

Price: $29.99

Hardcover EPUB Digital Audiobook Unabridged Trade PB

Format: Hardcover EPUB Digital Audiobook Unabridged Trade PB

• Book Overview
• Author Info

About the Book

"A haunting memoir of disarming honesty. . . a remarkable testament to the anguish and the beauty of foreign correspondence.”—Roger Cohen, New York Times Paris bureau chief and author of An Affirming Flame 

From award-winning journalist Jane Ferguson, an unflinching memoir of ambition and war—from The Troubles to the fall of Kabul.

Jane Ferguson has covered nearly every war front and humanitarian crisis of our time. She reported from Yemen as protests grew into the Arab Spring; she secured rare access to rebel-held Syria, where foreign journalists were banned, to cover its civil war. When the Taliban claimed Kabul in 2021, she was one of the last Western journalists to remain at the airport as thousands of Afghans, including some of her colleagues, struggled to evacuate.

Living with sectarian violence was nothing new to Ferguson. As a child in Northern Ireland in the 1980s and ‘90s, The Troubles meant bomb threats and military checkpoints on the way to school were commonplace. Books by Dervla Murphy and Martha Gellhorn offered solace from her turbulent family, and an opportunity to study Arabic in Yemen came as a relief—and a ticket to the life in journalism she imagined.

Without family wealth or connections, she began as a scrappy one-woman reporting team, a borrowed camera often her only equipment. Networks told her she had the wrong accent, the wrong appearance, not enough “bang-bang shoot-‘em-up.” Still, Ferguson threw herself into harm’s way time and again, determined to give voice to civilian experiences of war. In the face of grave violence and suffering, this seemed a small act of justice, no matter the risks.

Ferguson’s bold debut chronicles her unlikely journey from bright, inquisitive child to intrepid war correspondent. With an open-hearted humanity we rarely see in conflict stories, No Ordinary Assignment  shows what it means to build an authentic career against the odds. 

Critical Praise

"An engrossing chronicle of the costs and rewards of becoming like the women she saw delivering news of skirmishes and revolutions on TV. That Ferguson would become a war reporter who epitomizes this era is one of the anomalies of this compelling book. . . What raises No Ordinary Assignment above many other memoirs is the way it shows Ferguson's refusal to take shortcuts in her reporting. She fully lived her stories, experiencing the wars with the people she covered and writing with the kind of intimate knowledge that is prized by novelists and historians.”  — New York Times Book Review , Editor's Choice

“This is a must-read for anyone who aspires to be a journalist or loves to read and understand great journalism.” — Katie Couric

“With vivid details and pointed reflection, her memoir draws readers into the world of war that exists beyond the “bang bang” of most news coverage… Ferguson clearly demonstrates the devastating, oft-overlooked impact of war on civilians from every side… She is an expert storyteller… A captivating, honest, and powerful attempt to do justice to the hardest stories to tell.” — Kirkus Reviews   (starred review)

“For all the upheaval and conflict she’s seen, Jane Ferguson has never lost sight of the ordinary men and women caught in the middle of it all. This is the story of her journey, and it's told with breadth and verve and humanity.” — Dexter Filkins, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of  The Forever War

“Jane Ferguson’s life story is as extraordinary as her assignments. She takes the reader on an intimate and at times surprising journey from her childhood in conflict-torn Northern Ireland, through wars in the Middle East and Afghanistan until finally ending up in New York. Her prose is vivid; her narrative full of insight; and her stories infused with raw emotion as she bears witness to the brutality and destruction and memorializes the remarkable people she encountered along her way. This book should be savored and appreciated, not skimmed.” — Dr. Fiona Hill, senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and New York Times bestselling author of There Is Nothing For You Here

“So much has been packed into this young foreign correspondent’s remarkable life, you’d think she’s far older than she is. From Ireland to Yemen, Afghanistan, Somalia, Syria, and Ukraine, there’s hardly a war zone she hasn’t covered. But what most draws you in to this finely written memoir are the raw accounts of a childhood short on love and long on criticism that no doubt pushed her in the direction of a high-wire career, and, along the way, a soulful search to understand who, really, is Jane Ferguson?” — Judy Woodruff, former anchor of PBS NewsHour

“[ No Ordinary Assignment is] a standout, the best memoir I’ve read since Michelle Obama’s Becoming . . . Ferguson is an utterly compelling narrator because she’s startlingly honest and vulnerable. . .As talented and brave as she is as a TV correspondent, she is that rare person in TV who can really write. She knows how to create distance. What to put in, what to leave out. How to win a reader’s trust. How to make us feel that we are with her on extraordinary travels. How to inspire women everywhere to dream and to stick to our guns.” — Vicky Ward, New York Times bestselling author of Kushner, Inc.

"War correspondent Jane Ferguson’s courage and grit come through in this memoir, as she charts her lonely childhood in Northern Ireland and her determination to pursue journalism. The descriptions of her wartime reporting provide a dramatic view of conflicts in Yemen, Syria, and Afghanistan." — Christian Science Monitor

“ No Ordinary Assignment is an intimate portrait of a journalist coming into her own. For some of us that happens in boardrooms; for Jane Ferguson, it happened in war zones. Her memoir is a thrill to read and an inspiring example of what can happen when we confront fear and great risk with purpose.” — Pat Michell, author of Becoming a Dangerous Woman and cofounder of TEDWomen

“Growing up in Northern Ireland during The Troubles, Jane Ferguson gained a visceral, instinctive understanding of conflict. She brought an inquisitive eye and innate empathy to the greatest stories that have defined our age, from the wars in Syria, Yemen, and Afghanistan to the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Her courageous book is an honest, searing examination of these events—and of the toll they inflict on journalists who give up so much to keep telling the stories of those who often can’t speak for themselves.” — Yaroslav Trofimov, author of The Siege of Mecca and chief foreign-affairs correspondent at Wall Street Journal

“Jane Ferguson's gripping memoir,  No Ordinary Assignment , traces with compassion, insight, and honesty her career as a foreign correspondent… Astute, compassionate, and detailed,  No Ordinary Assignment  is a thoughtful eyewitness account from a reporter whose perspective is gracious and wise.” — Shelf Awareness

"Really important, brave reporting." — Nicholas Kristof

 "Jane Ferguson's breathtaking memoir takes us inside the savage wars of the last two decades with greater immediacy and compassion than any news report. Her inspiring and sometimes nerve jangling account shows what it takes to bring us the news: tremendous courage and determination, qualities she has in spades. Whether dreaming up an adventuresome life beyond Belfast or facing down murderous Yemeni warlords or Syrian torturers - or indeed network resistance - she is unflinching. Her book will forever alter the way you look at the news."  — Kati Marton, New York Times bestselling author of The Chancellor

Product Details

• ISBN: 9780063272248
• ISBN 10: 0063272245
• Imprint: Mariner Books
• Trimsize: 6.000 in (w) x 9.000 in (h) x 1.090 in (d)
• List Price: $29.99
• BISAC1 : HISTORY / Europe / Ireland
• BISAC2 : HISTORY / Military / Afghan War (2001-)
• BISAC3 : HISTORY / Modern / 21st Century
• BISAC4 : POLITICAL SCIENCE / Human Rights
• BISAC5 : BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Women
• BISAC6 : BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Editors, Journalists, Publishers
• BISAC7 : BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Personal Memoirs

Jane Ferguson

Jane Ferguson is a special correspondent for PBS NewsHour . Her reporting has won an Emmy Award, a Peabody Award, the George Polk Award, and the Aurora Humanitarian Journalism Award, among others. A frequent contributor to the New Yorker , she lives in New York City. 

OUT JULY 11TH 2023

"NO ORDINARY ASSIGNMENT – an unflinching memoir of ambition and war from award-winning journalist and special PBS NewsHour correspondent Jane Ferguson, will be released by HarperCollins, July 2023. For fans of Samantha Power, Marie Colvin, and Ariel Levy, Ferguson’s bold debut chronicles her unlikely journey from bright, inquisitive child to intrepid war correspondent reporting from the front lines of the most dangerous conflicts and dire humanitarian crises of our time.

In her bold debut, Ferguson tackles the question she’s so often asked: Why do you do what you do? Digging deep and reflecting on the moments and themes in her life that shaped her as a person before she was a professional, and then guided her journalism, Ferguson answers by taking the reader on her eventful life journey. From Northern Ireland to Yemen, Afghanistan, and every major front line of the last 15 years, NO ORDINARY ASSIGNMENT unveils the dramatic stories and the dedicated storytellers behind the news.

While other reporters chased “bang-bang-shoot-‘em-up” stories, a different set of questions guided Ferguson’s work - ones that gave faces and names to the people experiencing these conflicts. In the face of grave violence and suffering, giving voice to civilian lives seemed a small act of justice, no matter the risks.

With an open-hearted humanity rarely see in conflict stories, NO ORDINARY ASSIGNMENT shows what it means to build an authentic career against the odds." 

Dexter Filkins

The New Yorker

"Told with breadth and verve and humanity."

Roger Cohen

New York Times

"Ferguson delivers a remarkable testament to the anguish and the beauty of foreign correspondence."

Yaroslav Trofimov

WSJ Chief Foreign Correspondent

"Brings an inquisitive eye and innate empathy to the greatest stories that have defined our age."

“With vivid details and pointed reflection, her memoir draws readers into the world of war that exists beyond the ‘bang bang’ of most news coverage… Ferguson clearly demonstrates the devastating, oft-overlooked impact of war on civilians from every side… She is an expert storyteller… A captivating, honest, and powerful attempt to do justice to the hardest stories to tell.” — Kirkus Reviews (Starred Review)

“So much has been packed into this young foreign correspondent’s remarkable life, you’d think she’s far older than she is. From Ireland to Yemen, Afghanistan, Somalia, Syria, and Ukraine, there’s hardly a war zone she hasn’t covered. But what most draws you in to this finely written memoir are the raw accounts of a childhood short on love and long on criticism that no doubt pushed her in the direction of a high-wire career, and, along the way, a soulful search to understand who, really, is Jane Ferguson?” — Judy Woodruff, former anchor of PBS NewsHour

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No Ordinary Assignment: A Memoir

Jane Ferguson is a special correspondent for PBS NewsHour . Her reporting has won an Emmy Award, a Peabody Award, the George Polk Award, and the Aurora Humanitarian Journalism Award, among others. She is a frequent contributor to the New Yorker .

Below, Jane shares 5 key insights from her new book, No Ordinary Assignment: A Memoir . Listen to the audio version—read by Jane herself—in the Next Big Idea App.

1. Pay attention to what you loved as a child.

What drew your attention, what did you adore, and why do you think that was? Get to know who you were back then and you will know something more about what makes you happy now. Is it sports, stories, photography, engines, cars, travel? Connect the dots and find something related to that.

For me, as a little girl, it was storytelling. It was also foreign affairs, as I was a bit of a dork, but also travel, writing, and television.

2. Always have a final goal in mind, but remember that master plans are not necessary.

Master plans may actually be counterproductive. All you need is a goal, very clear in your mind. Focus on the role you want, the life you want, what that will feel like and the next step forward. Everything else in between, you can deal with as it appears.

“Focus on the role you want, the life you want, what that will feel like and the next step forward.”

This leaves you flexible enough to see and seize opportunities when they appear and evolve and follow your own path. When I was building a career in international reporting, there were many times when I had no idea how I was going to get a job somewhere. I often failed, and faced relentless amounts of rejection. The way to bounce back from that was to find the next step forward. Just one step and I was on my way again.

3. Excellence is key.

We live in an era of fast success, with the Mark Zuckerbergs of this world, and seemingly overnight successes. Young people are bombarded with the idea that if you are not a breakout star, you are somehow falling behind. The Top 25 Under 25 and 30 Under 30 Lists are total nonsense. Ignore them.

There is no gaming the system and overnight success is a myth. Anytime I’ve seen overnight success, it doesn’t last. The best way to succeed, and the only way to build truly authentic success at what you do, is to be undeniably brilliant at it. Seek excellence within yourself for the sake of knowing you are masterful at your craft. Study it. Study how others do it. Work on getting to be the best and most skilled, and this will slowly but most certainly be noticed. When the success comes, it will feel all the more fulfilling.

While working on becoming a journalist, I was not working within the structure of a news organization. I was learning by myself as a freelancer. I studied other more senior correspondents’ scripts, watching the evening news reports and transcribing their voices so I could figure out how they’d structured it. I watched how sequences of shots were filmed and put together. I studied languages, did endless background research before interviews, and dug into the history of everywhere I was reporting from. Each and every year, I wanted to see my own skills and my own reporting improving exponentially. The only falling behind there is is not getting better at what you do.

4. Do not compete with anyone other than yourself.

Learn from others. Study them. Take what is helpful in terms of their experience, but remind yourself that you are not competing with others. You only compete with yourself. When you do that, no one can compete with you.

In the earlier parts of my career, I would tie myself in knots wondering if I was going to be able to keep up with the career trajectories of other correspondents. Finally, I began to not think about them much at all. Instead, I recognized my only job was to keep moving forward on the path that was my own, reporting the stories that mattered to me regardless of what others were doing. I followed the angles and places that drew me away from the dramatic “bang, bang” stories, and stopped worrying about my career. From then one, I just got on with the work.

“As I stopped focusing on what others were doing, I had become a better storyteller.”

At dinner in Beirut one night, years ago, my friend told me they had noticed this shift in me. “I was watching you on the TV the other night and I thought, there you are. That’s Jane.” As I stopped focusing on what others were doing, I had become a better storyteller. I was more myself and more authentic. Run your own race and remember what Ram Dass said, “Treat everyone you meet like God in drag.”

5. Remember that, beyond your desire to live a big life, to be successful by most tangible measures, and to reach your potential, your work will always need to be of service to the world.

Ask yourself what service you are providing in the world. There must be a bigger dimension to what you are doing, that higher-level perspective. Be humble and be additive. The world doesn’t owe you a career. You are privileged to do what you do, so make it count, and always remember why you are doing it.

In my life and work, people often thank me for what I do. They suggest that only someone as brave as me would dare to go to these places and how few of us there must be. The truth is, newsrooms are full of young, talented, driven, and skilled journalists desperate for the opportunity to get out on assignment. I have been one. When I’m doing my work, I remember what a privilege it is to do it. The best way to acknowledge that privilege and do it justice is to remember you are to be of service to this world. That’s also the only real way to love what you do and build a meaningful career.

To listen to the audio version read by author Jane Ferguson, download the Next Big Idea App today:

Download the Next Big Idea App

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Ordinary Angels review – heartwarming rescue from the horrors of the US healthcare system

Alan Ritchson is impressive as a father who can’t pay his desperately sick child’s hospital fees, but the good-neighbour plot ignores a bigger question

I f you’re familiar with Alan Ritchson from his turn as Jack Reacher in the Amazon series based on the phenomenally popular Lee Child thrillers, get ready to see a different side of him in this weepy based on a true story. He’s once more playing a large, taciturn man (whether, per Reacher, his hands are still “as big as dinner plates” is not addressed), but here his problems cannot be solved by hitting things. Grieving the recent death of his wife, and drowning in debt from hospital bills, he’s devastated by the news that his youngest daughter may have only weeks or months to live, due to a condition related to that which claimed the life of her mother. Her only hope is yet more expensive treatment.

The revelation that a loud hairdresser with a drinking problem and zero sense of personal boundaries (played, effectively, by Hilary Swank at her most Dolly Parton), has read about his case in the local newspaper and decided to make the unfortunate family her personal recovery project is not immediately welcomed by the gruff widower. There’s an interesting moral tension at work here: the self-appointed saviour is legitimately helpful, raising thousands of dollars, but she will not take no for an answer, and the unsolicited intrusion crosses the line at several points. And yet … her interventions, taken as a whole, do vastly more good than harm.

Of course, the real villain of the piece is the American healthcare system; this is not a story that could be set in Europe. That a system exists where it is even possible to owe more than $400,000 to a hospital is the stuff of dystopian nightmares, but this film isn’t in the business of confronting the politics around the family’s predicament. Directed by Jon Gunn and written by Meg Tilly and Kelly Fremon Craig, the heartwarming spectacle of a maverick force for good rallying an entire community to save one unfortunate family makes for better drama than questioning why that family is in need of saving in the first place. Taken on its own terms as an old-fashioned character drama and showcase for Ritchson as a dramatic actor (he’s genuinely really good), it does the job it set out to do.

• Drama films
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