It\u2019s the late 1980\u2019s, and a young American female photojournalist sent to the war in Afghanistan is bleeding profusely.<\/p>\n
She can\u2019t change her tampon.<\/p>\n
This beginning to the Deborah Copaken Kogan\u2019s Shutterbabe<\/em>, a memoir of sorts following Kogan\u2019s years as a war photojournalist, is highly representative of the rest of the novel to come.<\/p>\n This novel is about being a little girl in a tough man\u2019s world. It follows Kogan through the deserts of the Middle East to the jungles down in Africa. There are some moments, particularly when Kogan\u2019s commentary about the war situation becomes factual, that the novel redeems itself, but as a whole, the \u201cwoman playing by her own rules in a man\u2019s role\u201d mask the novel wears just doesn\u2019t work.<\/p>\n The biggest reason for this is because Kogan never really decides if she wants to be viewed as a man-crazy woman off on an adventure or a serious photojournalist trying to make a name for herself.<\/p>\n When Kogan says things like \u201cMen are like books, to be read or skimmed, studied or forgotten … they can’t all be Anna Karenina, but that doesn’t mean I can’t enjoy them just the same,\u201d she sounds like the fictitious sex columnist Carrie Bradshaw of Sex and the City fame.<\/p>\n When she says things like \u201cThere’s a dead body in a shower room. And there are children tied to beds. And flapping hands… I have seen footage like this before\u2026 women and children standing gaunt behind barbed wire, branded with numbers and yellow stars,\u201d describing a Romanian orphanage, she sounds like a hard-hitting photojournalist.<\/p>\n It\u2019s not like Kogan doesn\u2019t have the intelligence to back up her desire to be taken seriously. She was a Harvard grad and went on to her career in photojournalism from there. Some of the photos that she took ended up being published in famous publications such as Newsweek, Time Magazine, <\/em>and The New York Times<\/em>. It almost is like she is trying to undermine her success by being completely man-crazy and sex-driven. Perhaps she sees it as freeing and powerful to be sexually adventurous as a woman. It\u2019s all in the eyes of reader.<\/p>\n Can she be both Carrie Bradshaw and a respected photojournalist? Absolutely. Does it work in this book? Not in my opinion. The chapters of the book are named after her \u201cman of the moment,\u201d and yet, she discusses brutal and hard-to-digest things within those chapters. It takes some seriousness away from what could have been a powerful novel. Instead, it leaves the reader unsure of what to think.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" It\u2019s the late 1980\u2019s, and a young American female photojournalist sent to the war in Afghanistan is bleeding profusely. She can\u2019t change her tampon. This beginning to the Deborah Copaken Kogan\u2019s Shutterbabe, a memoir of sorts following Kogan\u2019s years as a war photojournalist, is highly representative of the rest of the novel to come. This […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":213,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-104","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.morningside.edu\/michellek\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/104","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.morningside.edu\/michellek\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.morningside.edu\/michellek\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.morningside.edu\/michellek\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/213"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.morningside.edu\/michellek\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=104"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.morningside.edu\/michellek\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/104\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":105,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.morningside.edu\/michellek\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/104\/revisions\/105"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.morningside.edu\/michellek\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=104"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.morningside.edu\/michellek\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=104"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.morningside.edu\/michellek\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=104"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}