A review by t_bone
War Reporting for Cowards by Chris Ayres

2.0

I like books about war and I am coward so I really thought I would enjoy this book, but I gave up half way through (I'm still counting it toward my 2016 book challenge though). There were a few laughs, but not enough for a book meant to be witty. The fact that I did not find it funny kept drawing my attention to the fact that the author said little about the Bush administration and the reasons for the invasion of Iraq. This seemed to me to be the only real act of cowardice Ayres committed. I'm not asking for an entire critique of the war, but a person's feelings about the justness of the war inevitably colour their observation of it. It might have given another avenue to find laughs. Or perhaps attempts at humour should have been abandoned altogether, not because it's always wrong to laugh at awful things, just because the writing was strongest when it was serious. The description of what it was like to be in New York on September 11 was the best part of the book, well at least the half of the book that I actually read (I'm still counting it though!).