For Redstone Review, by Rick Visser
Whether climbing through barbed wire in the dark of night at Wounded Knee, trying to get a cab out of Kabul during the Soviet invasion, or interviewing Muammar Gaddafi in a Libyan corn field, Greg Dobbs is on the move…and is, as always, in the wrong lane.
Dobbs, a world-class journalist, has covered some of recent history’s most fascinating and disturbing events. His new book, ‘Life in the Wrong Lane,’ describes with exhilaration and riveting detail his role in some of these events. The book’s title is well chosen. For, as he says, “that’s where journalists live: in the one lane heading toward a catastrophe. Everyone who’s normal is in the other lane, any other lane, going the other way. They’re getting out.”
Dobbs has been in the wrong lane for some time. For twenty-three years, he worked at ABC News, first as producer, then for most of his career as a correspondent, including ten years overseas. He won two national Emmy Awards in the process, and is currently a correspondent for HDNet Television, reporting documentaries for the program “World Report.”
‘Life in the Wrong Lane’ takes the reader on an oft times wild ride through the very bowels of recent history. As Dobbs says, these stories are about “all the funny, bizarre, scary, stupid, dangerous, distasteful, unwise, and unbelievable things that journalists experience just getting to the point of reporting a story.”
Each of the book’s fourteen stories begins with a brief historical introduction, usually a page or less. These are essential as they serve to refresh our memory and set the scene.
Dobbs wastes no time. After setting the scene, he jumps quickly into the story, taking the reader inside, perhaps underneath, a significant moment or event in recent history: the fall of Idi Amin, the stand-off at Wounded Knee, Desert Storm, the execution of Gary Gilmore, the Iranian revolution, and many other remarkable places and events.
Dobbs writes in a crisp, casual, and humorously conversational style, as if he just now returned home and is telling the story to a gathering of friends. Electricity clings to the fabric of every sentence.
Dobbs has obviously seen a lot, far more than many people ever want to see, no matter what the take-home. In one story, we find him careening through Idi Amin’s prison:
“We followed the Tanzanian soldiers down into the building. Down the stairs into the dungeons. Battering their way through the iron doors to find more stairs. And more dungeons. A skeleton still hanging from a noose. Other skeletons chained to walls. Beside one, a pair of glasses. After our march down the road to Entebbe and all the stories people rushed to tell us about what little it took for Idi Amin to brand them as enemies, I understood.”
Clearly, such experience gives Dobbs an extraordinary view of life on earth, a view that deserves our attention and consideration.
If you like adventure, and want to know why journalists go in when others want out, this is the book to read.
