8
SUNDAY
The media haven’t always been deluged with charges of sensationalism, frivolity, and overall improbity: Kurt Volkert and T. Jeff Williams’ A Cambodian Odyssey and the Deaths of 25 Journalists provides insight into a period of history when journalists risked life and limb to bring the horrors of Vietnam into American living rooms. The two were working for news outfits in 1970, the year Cambodia saw a political coup and the beginning of a spillover from the war in neighboring Vietnam, and when 25 reporters and camerapeople with various news agencies were killed or reported missing while covering that Southeast Asian nation. Volkert and Williams manage to provide a detailed historical account of these deaths and disappearances and color their book with amusing personal anecdotesall without diminishing the deaths of the journalists or the estimated 1 million Cambodians who also died during and after the conflict. Williams will discuss the book at 3 p.m. at the Newseum, 1101 Wilson Blvd., Arlington. Free. (703) 284-3544. (Sarah Godfrey)