AUDIE CORNISH, HOST:
In the news business, stringers are freelancers. They're paid by the story. It can be a dangerous way to make a living, especially overseas. A new memoir chronicles the adventures of a young journalist trying to make his mark. It's called "Stringer," and Ted Koppel knows a thing or two about reporting, says it terrific.
TED KOPPEL, BYLINE: The trick for a young journalist is to find a location rich in material but light on the competitive side. The more poverty stricken, dirty, corrupt and dangerous, the better. By those criteria, you couldn't find a richer environment than Congo, which is where Anjan Sundaram embarks on his career as a stringer. Why is never entirely clear. One moment, he's at Yale, about to embark on his doctoral studies in mathematics. And the next, he's telling his adviser that he's off to Congo to try and be a journalist.
Sundaram prepares for his journey into the heart of darkness by plying a Congolese bank teller in New Haven with lunches at Dunkin' Donuts. She in turn introduces him to a community of Congolese emigres and diplomats and, most important, arranges for him to stay in Kinshasa at the home of her husband's brother. But that marks one of the significant differences between a stringer and a staff correspondent for a major newspaper or network. Stringers tend to become totally immersed in a local culture. They lack the resources to do otherwise.
Sundaram bounces in and out of precarious situations like Pip in an African version of "Great Expectations." What he lacks in common sense, he makes up for in grit. When his cellphone is snatched by a young thief, Sundaram plunges after him into a truly vile slum, in the vain hope that he'll be able to buy the phone, with its addresses and numbers, back. Heading off on another occasion in a communal taxi to deposit his U.S. dollars in a bank, he is robbed at gunpoint by his fellow passengers. Enraged but still innocent, Sundaram brings his complaint to a police station, believing somehow that the police will recover his money. They won't even look, he learns, without a substantial bribe to prime the pump.
If Anjan Sundaram was lacking in cynicism at that stage in his career as a reporter, he makes no excuses. And it does lend a fresh and charming candor to his writing. Inevitably, of course, "Stringer" tries to address the atrocities of Congo's endless brutality, and the scope truly does stagger the imagination. The number of Congolese killed in that country's endless wars now tops five million. Wisely, Sundaram takes no more than a passing swipe at the big picture. Congo's enormous mineral wealth that drew Belgian colonialists, the Soviets, the Americans and, more recently, all of Congo's envious neighbors. He is best writing about what he has experienced: Congo's poverty and superstition, its family loyalties and many tiny kindnesses. This is a book about a young journalist's coming of age, and a wonderful book it is, too.
CORNISH: NPR commentator, Ted Koppel. The book is "Stringer: A Reporter's Journey in the Congo" by Anjan Sundaram.