Unless we’re actual combatants, the lens through which we view war is almost always that of the war correspondent, using either images, or words, or both. Here is an oversized volume which portrays in stark, and often horrifying detail how wars were documented over the past two centuries, since the dawn of photography. Graphics, propaganda posters, newspaper headlines, and other ephemera are liberally interspersed, as are seldom seen photos of lesser known wars.

Beginning with Roger Fenton, the first photographer to go to war (in Crimea, 1855), War Correspondents offers 600 pages of frontline images, alongside dramas behind the lines, of the American Civil War (with Matthew Brady and others), The Boer Wars, the Spanish American War,World War I (the the miserably misnamed Great War), the Spanish Civil War (1936-39) the Japanese invasion of Shangai, and World War II. In the latter, startling color photographs, often by Germans, begin to appear. The surrender of Japan aboard the USS Missouri is recorded in full color. Korea is followed by Viet Nam, and then the 6-day War and the Yom Kippur War, when color begins to prevail. Angola, Kosovo the Falkland Islands, Desert Storm, Afghanistan and Iraq and then Georgia and Ossetia, bring us up to present-day Korea. In four languages, and printed on archive-quality stock, elaborate captions are provided for each photograph, and introductory passages are included for each war.
War buffs, or anyone else fascinated about the past two centuries of astonishing brutality will want to own this book.