Greetings all. I’m on my way back from a much-needed break after mostly wrapping up the Audible project I’ll be announcing shortly. In coming days I’ll be bringing you up to speed on all the reporting developments around the topics you know I love to cover. Epstein, Kushner, Trump and more.

First, however, I need to tell you about a book, out tomorrow, July 11th. No Ordinary Assignment by Jane Ferguson.

Jane is one of the rising stars in the elite tiny group of TV correspondents who report from dangerous far-flung war zones. She’s currently the Special Correspondent for PBS Newshour. She’s won an Emmy, the George Polk Award and a Peabody Award. She’s done incredibly difficult, dangerous reporting from deep inside Somalia, Syria, Yemen, Iraq, Egypt, Afghanistan, Beirut and more.

But what makes her memoir a standout, the best memoir I’ve read since Michelle Obama’s Becoming, is the writing that borders on the poetic. In a way her prose style reminds me of Harper Lee, a novelist who was no war reporter—but just as Lee could transport her readers into a sun-baked street in the South, where time slowed, fans fluttered, and sweat beads gathered, so, too Ferguson takes us deep into the smells, the sounds, the spirit of the people in the conflict zones she buries herself in.

Read on at Vicky Ward Investigates