Trifter

I just had to write this review as Kate Adie’s The Kindness of Stanger’s is possibly one of the best books I’ve ever read. The books title can be related to be anyone who has ever travelled. Originally from Blanche, a character in Tennessee Williams’ A Street Car named Desire. However I think you’d struggle to find a woman less like Blanche Du Bois.

 Adie’s life is one that has been lived to the upmost and she takes you on an amazing adventure from following Prince Charles around India, to being shot in the collar bone by an ‘irate Libyan’; the ins and outs of the eccentric BBC to the war in Iraq. In this sense it is also a must-read for those who were born in the later half of the 1980’s to get to grips with a lot of the political and cultural changes you won’t learn about at school, with a lot more insight about the likes of the Royals and the British and army than you would ever read in a newspaper.

While she could have rightly taken us through agonising descriptions of the horrors she’s seen, she has woven a hilarious self-effacing humour into her novel that even had me laughing out loud on the bus. Whilst I laughed at the idea of her body slamming one of three Tiananmen Square policeman to get into a hotel, it glosses over an extraordinarily brave act by a middle aged woman in order to get her footage of the horrors of China to an otherwise clueless world. Her vocabulary has an enchanting nerd-like quality as this legendry female reporter ‘squawks’ at army generals and goes ‘tootling’ round Sri Lanka in search of a murderer.

What kept me begging for more was a fantastic coyness in revealing details of her personal life that are begging to be asked. In fact you have wait until one of the last chapters before she even touches on her adopted parents. However there are several photos of Kate with her real and adopted mothers. The book is also dedicated to ‘Babe,’ her biological mother, to leave you guessing. She doesn’t even touch on, merely waves towards, ‘a rocky love life’. However her obvious and infectious love for her career permeates into the hands holding the page.

You can sympathise with and fully feel Adies’ bitterness for the way in which the BBC have given up some of their best reporters for a fake tanned, more photogenic bunch who enact any emotion instructed by the editors. However whilst many aging, Arlene Philips-type women have no retired their sofas, throwing insults at the BBC for being replaced, Adie refuses to sink as her autobiography has presented her as not only one of the best reporters of all time but also a vastly talented, not to mention, hilarious writer.

As an aspiring news journo, she has made my aspiration passion. In one of the hardest careers in the world (lets face it, most offices won’t send you out to sleep in frozen trenches and invade Afghanistan) she is a huge role model and in every sense an absolute hero.