TIMES OF TERROR - Notebooks of a Foreign
correspondent
A Journalist’s Journeys in History, Politics & His Profession
Author: Uli Schmetzer
From interviewing celebrities such as Bob Dylan, Louis Armstrong and Marlene Dietrich as a young tabloid
journalist, to uncovering war crimes during Pinochet’s coup in Chile as a Reuters correspondent, from
hobnobbing with Fidel Castro as the only foreign correspondent in the early days of Cuba’s revolution, to
parachuting into the Middle East when the first Intifada broke out, the bombing of Tripoli or reporting the
Tiananmen Square bloodletting Uli Schmetzer has seen and covered it all. Times of Terror: Notebooks of a
Foreign Correspondent, a Journalist’s Journeys in History, Politics, and His Profession is Schmetzer’s
edge-of-the-seat, tell-all memoir of an astonishing career as one of the most experienced and celebrated foreign
correspondents.
Times of Terror follows an arc of disillusion with the world of tabloid journalism, to the highest idealism, risking his
life and limb to get the story out on torture and massacre in Third World countries, back to disillusion with the
hopes and promises of the journalistic trade, caught up in a Kafkaesque public spectacle around a quote he
doctored to protect his source, a public sacrifice to journalistic integrity against a backdrop of the very same
papers lying a nation into war.
During his long career, Schmetzer pursued hard-hitting stories without fear or favor. Yet, ultimately, he began to
lose faith in his profession, as he saw how difficult it was to get these hard-hitting stories into print, particularly if
they questioned government lines. In a stunning and frank Epilogue of his book Schmetzer expresses the depth
of his disillusion with the trade AS it marched lockstep with George W. Bush into his war in Iraq.
Times of Terror – Notebooks of a Foreign Correspondent will not only appeal to history buffs—offering as it
does a front-seat ride at some of the greatest historical events of the latter half of the twentieth century—but
also to all those who want an honest, no-holds-barred, unsentimental look into the way the journalistic trade
actually operates, and how the news really gets made.
