Veteran New York Times journalist Nicholas Kristof’s memoir Chasing Hope opens in 1997 and in harrowing fashion. He’s a passenger in a small commuter plane airborne over a jungle in the central African nation of the Congo where he is on assignment. But the flight was anything but normal from the moment it took off.
A man stands in the middle of the runway as the plane gathers speed for lift off. Dale, the pilot, thinks the man surely will move out of the way, but no. As the plane increases speed, the man doesn’t budge. As Kristof writes:
“Dale pulled the nose of the plane up, trying to get over the man, but there wasn’t time. He got the plane three feet off the ground, and then we all heard the collision as the right wheel assembly rammed into the man at ninety miles an hour, killing him instantly and collapsing the landing gear…There was the man’s body six feet away through the window, wrapped around the right landing gear.”
There was nothing to be done about the man, but suddenly the lives of everyone on board the plane were imperiled. Hydraulic lines had been severed, and Dale was going to need to find a patch of land in the dense jungle to crash land the plane.
Interspersed with details of this flight, Kristof expounds on the nature of journalists and journalism and why people are drawn to the profession. In particular, Kristoff writes about why he, and others, are drawn to being foreign correspondents, often covering global hotspots, such as the Congo in 1997. It’s often a dangerous pursuit: Scores of journalists are killed around the world every year.
Kristof, early on, calls his memoir a “love letter” to journalism. He writes:
“We are sometimes cynical, but journalism itself should never be. Its fuel is a sense of mission, a feeling of responsibility to record history on the run, a determination to get out and talk to people and uncover the truth.”
After Kristof waxes philosophically about journalism writ large, the author picks up the thread of the plane and the dilemma the passengers on board were facing, and in so doing, he reveals the origin of the title. He references his father’s struggles to escape a dictator and a repressive society and the circuitous route he traveled to reach the United states, how he picked himself up by his bootstraps, learned English, became an academic and started a family. Kristoff saw in his parents, success stories due to their optimism that with hard work, anything is possible.
So by their example, Kristof himself became an optimist even as he walked into dangerous locales to tell the story. Even as he found himself waiting for the pilot to find a place to take the plane down for a crash landing:
“So, somehow, as the small is plummeting into the central African jungle. I am still chasing hope.”
And thus ends the first chapter. Subsequently, Kristof’s tale recounts his small town upbringing in Oregon and the relationship he had with his core of high school friends. He fills us in on his early inclination to journalism when he was still in high school. He describes his time spent in school at Harvard, an Ivy school student, this son of an immigrant who couldn’t speak a word of English when he came to America.
Kristoff takes us along as he interviews for a job the New York Times’ legendary Abe Rosenthal and is shocked to be offered that job on the spot. He was all of twenty-five-years old.
As Kristof’s story progresses, we follow his travels around the world, how he meets his wife — a journalist herself, how they start a family. And how he attempted unsuccessfully to become governor of his home state of Oregon.
This book truly is a love letter to journalism. Kristof pulls back the curtain of this most necessary of professions and spins a compelling tale about a man spurred on by a passion for story-telling. I heartily recommend it.
