Nonfiction
Being Nick Kristof
In “Chasing Hope,” the veteran Times journalist remembers the highs and lows of his storied career.
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Reeves Wiedeman is a features writer at New York magazine and the author of “Billion Dollar Loser: The Epic Rise and Spectacular Fall of Adam Neumann and WeWork.”
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CHASING HOPE: A Reporter’s Life, by Nicholas D. Kristof
There aren’t many journalists who can claim to have had more of an impact on the world than Nicholas D. Kristof. In 1997, one of his dispatches for The New York Times, about routine ailments killing children in India and elsewhere, inspired Bill and Melinda Gates to focus their philanthropy on global health; billions of dollars later, that article hangs in the lobby of the Gates Foundation. In the 2000s, according to the former head of the International Rescue Committee, Kristof’s coverage of the genocide in Darfur saved hundreds of thousands of lives.
And then, of course, there is the editorial Kristof wrote for The Carlton-Yamhill Review while in grade school, successfully challenging a rule against girls’ wearing bluejeans. His goals, he explains in his memoir, “Chasing Hope,” were to “impress girls” and to “overthrow the patriarchy.”
Stories like these, and many more, fill up Kristof’s book, which charts a charmed and committed journalistic life. Kristof has spent four decades at The Times, and won two Pulitzer Prizes — he shared the first with his wife, Sheryl WuDunn, in 1990, for their reporting on the Tiananmen Square massacre — but his career began all the way back when he was a boy in rural Oregon battling the powers that be and dreaming of becoming a foreign correspondent. It didn’t take him long to get there.
“I was the youngest national correspondent at the paper,” Kristof writes after describing his arrival at The Times in 1984; he was 25 years old and promoted quickly. A few pages later, he’s off to Hong Kong “to become the youngest foreign correspondent” at the paper. (A trigger warning for other journalists: His annual expenses in 1980s Hong Kong came out to more than $500,000 in today’s dollars.)
“Chasing Hope” is devoted in large part to stories about how Kristof got the story and to documenting his swift rise through the journalistic ranks at The Times. But it begins on a descent, in 1997, with Kristof aboard a small airplane that is crash-landing in the Congolese jungle amid a civil war. Before the crash, he begs a soldier to sign a handmade receipt for a $100 bribe, which Kristof had paid him so the plane could refuel.
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