The Face of War

American journalist Martha Gellhorn witnessed the greatest military conflicts of the 20th century: from the Spanish Civil War to World War II, from the Soviet-Finnish to the Arab-Israeli War, from the American invasion of Vietnam to the conflicts in El Salvador and Nicaragua in the 1980s. Disdaining the lies of official press releases, Gellhorn went into the thick of things everywhere, talking to soldiers, the wounded, and refugees, and reporting on what war looked like to the ordinary people caught in its millstones. Her collection of reports, The Face of War, spans nearly fifty years of bloodshed and failed attempts to establish a lasting peace, and is a slap in the face statement about the state of humanity that has not aged in the half-century since.