The name of Martin Fletcher may not be an instantly recognizable one, but the places he's been to - Somalia, Rwanda, Bosnia, Afghanistan, Israel, Zimbabwe, among many others - and the conflicts he's covered as a cameraman, reporter and finally bureau chief for NBC will sound much more familiar. In Breaking News, Fletcher recounts his front-row, behind the scenes view of some of the wars and revolutions of the modern era. Breaking News is more than a history lesson of man's inhumanity to man; Fletcher looks beyond the headlines to find the actual people who make things happen - from an African warlord to a sixty-year-old Israeli grandmother, from a displaced Serbian girl to two terrorists in Palestine. It makes for a compelling, gripping and intense memoir of a 30-year career.

Fletcher starts his story as an opportunistic young cameraman, out to see the world and travel for free. He arrives in Israel in 1973, and when the Yom Kippur War breaks out, has three questions: who is attacking Israel, where are the Golan Heights, and where can I buy shower curtains for my apartment? But he's forced to take things seriously when he and his colleagues are caught in a minefield. There is one fatality and lots of injuries, many of them serious, but Fletcher is unharmed. The experience forces him to change his perspective; he resolves to not just report the news, but get to the hows, whys and whos of the people that make the news.

The strength of Breaking News is when it does away with black and white concepts of good and evil, right and wrong, and presents a landscape much more ambiguous and complicated. It's easy to write about Palestinian militants who celebrate a successful suicide bombing in Tel Aviv, and then talk about their families, their land, and going back to school to finish their education. But the gray area is closer to home than you'd think, as when NBC refused to run a story on a tribal massacre in Zaire, because nobody knew where Zaire was or why the second Katangese invasion of Shaba was important. But when two thousand white people were trapped by rebels in a small town, NBC changed their tune ("a huge story", an NBC desk editor called it). "Nobody cared about ten thousand dead blacks," Fletcher writes. "Two thousand whites in danger and we were mobilizing the network."

What makes Breaking News as compelling as it is, is how well Fletcher writes himself into the book. What's going on behind the camera while a Palestinian militant calmly explains to a Jewish reporter why Jews were "dogs and pigs"? As a soft-spoken mujahid says that he and his friends would rather "die in Jihad than live against Allah"? While the Somalian General Mohammed Farrah Aidid, dining on food intended for refugees, explains why the West misunderstands him? That's what Breaking News is about. It's much more than Fletcher merely recounting what he reported: when he talks to the survivors of a suicide bombing in Tel Aviv, and the next day talks to the people who sent the bombers out, your stomach turns.

There are so many brilliant things about Breaking News: Fletcher and his Israeli colleague interviewing an Albanian who proudly relates that his father served in Hitler's SS; seeing bloated and mutilated bodies in Rwanda's River of Corpses; or the decision to film a Somalian child dying of starvation because of the lack of global interest in the Somalian Civil War. Along the way, Fletcher makes references to some of the other stories he covered, and the only reason those mentions are distracting is because they'd make such good additions to this book. That aside, Breaking News is a fascinating, intense and memorable look at thirty years reporting conflicts both divisive and forgotten, and the people - generals, terrorists, soldiers and survivors - behind the headlines.