Book Night: You Don’t Belong Here - an OPC Chat with Elizabeth Becker 

Join the OPC for cocktails and conversation with Elizabeth Becker, an award-winning reporter, to discuss her book You Don’t Belong Here, the long-buried story of three extraordinary female journalists who permanently shattered the official and cultural barriers to women covering war.

Kate Webb, an Australian iconoclast, Catherine Leroy, a French daredevil photographer, and Frances FitzGerald, a blue-blood American intellectual, arrived in Vietnam with starkly different life experiences but one shared purpose: to report on the most consequential story of the decade.

At a time when women were considered unfit to be foreign reporters, Frankie, Catherine and Kate paid their own way to war in 1966, arrived without jobs, challenged the rules imposed on them by the military, ignored the belittlement and resentment of their male peers and found new ways to explain the war through the people who lived through it.

What emerges is an unforgettable story of three journalists forging their place in a land of men, often at great personal sacrifice, and forever altering the craft of war reportage for generations.

In her 40-year journalism career, Becker was an award-winning reporter for The Washington Post, National Public Radio and The New York Times. She is also the author of WHEN THE WAR WAS OVER: Cambodia and the Khmer Rouge Revolution; and OVERBOOKED: The Exploding Business of Travel and Tourism.

Ann Cooper, Professor Emerita of the Columbia Journalism School, will be the moderator.