Passport Stamps: Searching the World for a War to Call Home

by Sean D Carberry

Overview

A candid, darkly comic, and emotionally naked tale of a former NPR journalist who-driven by grief, loss, and the desire to find his "tribe"-seeks solace in the world's most dangerous places and his pursuit to join the ranks of combat-tested war correspondents. The learning curve of reporting in hostile environments is steep and at times comical, at others nearly fatal. He encounters a lot of dust, ragged infrastructure, weaponry, scary driving, whiskey, lust, and way too much food poisoning. When the assignment ends, he is left to confront the mental and emotional impact of the years of danger, death, and destruction.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781956440553
Publisher:	Madville Publishing LLC
Publication date:	08/15/2023
Pages:	352
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.88(d)

About the Author

Sean Carberry is an award-winning journalist, writer, and editor. In his more than 15 years as a radio and print journalist, he has traveled to dozens of countries, including the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Iraq, Libya, Sudan, Syria, and Yemen. He was NPR's last Kabul-based correspondent in 2012 through 2014. After that, he spent several years working for the Defense Department Office of Inspector General, writing and editing oversight reports on counterterrorism operations, before returning to journalism. In a previous life, he was a Gold Record-winning recording engineer and producer. He has a B.A. from Lehigh University and an M.P.A. from the Harvard Kennedy School. He lives in Washington, D.C. with his cat Squeak who he rescued from the streets of Kabul.

Editorial Reviews

"I wasn't who I was because I was a journalist, I was a journalist because of who I am." We need such journalists. Sean Carberry has written a brave book for which there are no passport stamps-the soul highs and lows of intoxicating faith leaping around dangerous combat zones on a years-long adrenalin rush. This is a clarion call for better mental health treatment after a confusing exodus from that world, where writing knits together that which is frayed and keeps indelible experiences on the shelves of story, always.

--Jacki Lyden, author of Daughter of the Queen of Sheba and former NPR host and correspondent

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Passport Stamps brings to mind Gale Garnett's "We'll Sing in the Sunshine." Carberry describes the evanescence of sunshine and darkness followed by the inevitable being "on the way" of a journalist. Carberry's world is a tattered web of people and places: Serbia, Russia, Egypt, Columbia, Lebanon, Syria, Yemen, Afghanistan-our simultaneously horrifying yet alluring broken globe. Passport Stamps records Carberry's memories-accounts which make the reader ache for his forgotten life, real or imagined. It is a sharp, raking marvelous travel book, an autobiography rich with detail and ponderings about life.

--Sam Pickering, author of The Gate in the Garden Wall, and "The Truth"

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A lot of journalists come back from covering war and disaster and write the book about what they saw. Sean Carberry tells a different story-about what goes on inside of such a reporter's mind out there. Hopes, dreams, fears, embarrassment, hard lessons. It's all there, and it's quite a yarn.

--John Donvan, former ABC News correspondent, filmmaker, and author of In a Different Key: The Story of Autism

From the Publisher

2024-04-24
A war correspondent explores the dark corners of post-9/11 world history in this debut memoir.

Carberry never imagined himself a journalist, let alone a war correspondent who’d spend years in some of the most dangerous places in the world. As a Gold Record–winning audio engineer and record producer, he produced the radio show The Connection, aired by Boston’s National Public Radio. Following a traumatic personal experience and the 9/11 terrorist attacks and subsequent war in Afghanistan, he felt called by “a sense of public duty” to shift careers. More than a decade later, as a Peabody Award–winning journalist for NPR, the author offers a “Bourdain-esque travel book” that takes readers on an international tour that juxtaposes the “dust, grit, ragged infrastructure…and way too much food poisoning” of war-torn nations with the “beauty, humanity, generosity, [and] kindness” of people (and cats) encountered along the way. Aside from occasional stints in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Serbia, and Washington, D.C., most of the book takes place in North Africa and the Middle East as Carberry covers the genocide in Sudan’s Darfur region and America’s wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. It’s an intimate book—much of the narrative focuses on the author battling his own personal demons (“I am still broken and full of holes,” he writes in the final pages), and Carberry openly discusses sensitive topics that include post-traumatic stress disorder, suicidal ideations, gruesome violence, and loneliness. With an advanced degree from the Harvard Kennedy School and a career that included a stint at the Department of Defense, the author has a firm grasp on historical context and international politics. As such, he offers a well-informed, probing commentary on American foreign policy in the 21st century as well as a behind-the-scenes look at modern journalism, which, he notes, is often based on “dumb luck.” Citing Hunter S. Thompson and Warren Zevon (who provided “the soundtrack to this book”) as his influences, Carberry relates globe-hopping, often chaotic anecdotes that effectively evoke both his internal turmoil and the existential dangers that surrounded him for years.

A poignant, gritty memoir of a disillusioned reporter.

Kirkus Reviews