For the Bookworm
Book Review- LIGHT AND SHADOW: MARK COLVIN 2016
Light and Shadow is the late Mark Colvin’s memoir of his extraordinary life as a foreign correspondence and broadcaster who witnessed and reported on some of the key events of the boomer generation. Readers are swept along as history unfolds from the American hostage crisis in Tehran, the Hilton Hotel bombing, the Rwanda genocide, the Falkland’s War, to the Granville train disaster and much more.
It is also a personal study of his life with a father who was a British diplomat and a spy. The latter fact being concealed until Colvin was in his mid-twenties. With a childhood living in London, Oslo, Vienna and Kuala Lumpur and later visits to see Dad in Mongolia and Washington it has the feel of a boys own adventure. Even more so with Colvin’s description of his five years at the Dickensian Summer Fields boarding school.
Colvin story is also an insightful examination of journalism both its practicalities and its wider purpose. He neatly parallels the disciplines of journalism with those of espionage with the only difference being the output. His mantra of facts before conclusions and plurality of observation are strongly held as is the need to separate reporting from editorial comment. The least interesting section of the book is a somewhat narrow view about the role of the ABC.
He contracted a serious disease in the mid-1990s and lived with pain and disability thereafter. Given Colin’s strength of character and resilience that is revealed throughout his journey it is no surprise that he refused to be defined by this misfortune. His reporting days behind him he goes on to host PM for two decades.
This is a life well lived and Colvin emerges as an articulate, thoughtful and decent person who has woven together a thoroughly intriguing, insightful and informative tale.