Elizabeth Becker

Rendezvous Avec Pol Pot by: Premiered at Cannes Film Festival
In French theaters on June 5.

Based on Elizabeth Becker’s dangerous interview with Pol Pot when he was dictator of Cambodia.

As she told in her award-winning book WHEN THE WAR WAS OVER. - BUY BOOK

You Don’t Belong Here

The long buried story of three extraordinary female journalists who permanently shattered the official and cultural barriers to women covering war.

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How Three Women Rewrote the Story of War

Kate Webb, an Australian iconoclast, Catherine Leroy, a French dare devil photographer, and Frances FitzGerald, a blue-blood American intellectual, arrived in Vietnam with starkly different life experiences but one shared purpose: to report on the most consequential story of the decade.

At a time when women were considered unfit to be foreign reporters, Frankie, Catherine and Kate paid their own way to war, arrived without jobs, challenged the rules imposed on them by the military, ignored the belittlement and resentment of their male peers and found new ways to explain the war through the people who lived through it.

Elizabeth Becker uses these women’s work and lives to illuminate the Vietnam War from the 1965 American buildup, through the Tet Offensive, the expansion into Cambodia, the American defeat and its aftermath. Arriving herself in the last years of the war, Elizabeth writes as an historian and a witness to what these women accomplished.

What emerges is an unforgettable story of three journalists forging their place in a land of men, often at great personal sacrifice, and forever altering the craft of war reportage for generations. Deeply reported and filled with personal letters, interviews, and profound insight, You Don’t Belong Here fills a void in the history of women and of war.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Elizabeth Becker began her career as a war correspondent for the Washington Post in Cambodia. She has been the Senior Foreign Editor for National Public Radio and a New York Times correspondent covering national security, economics and foreign policy. She has won accolades from the Overseas Press Club, DuPont Columbia’s Awards and was part the Times team that won the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service for coverage of 9/11. She is the author of When the War was Over: Cambodia and the Khmer Rouge Revolution, the classic history that has been in print for 35 years; and Overbooked: The Exploding Business of Travel and Tourism, an expose of the travel industry that was an Amazon book of the year.

Additional Books by Elizabeth Becker

: OVERBOOKED

: WHEN THE WAR WAS OVER

: BOPHANA

: AMERICA’S VIETNAM WAR

I’ve read widely on that ill-conceived war (Vietnam). If there is one book that will transport you back to that time, that will give you a sense of what it’s like to be on the ground in Southeast Asia, this book is it.

Tom Patterson

presenting Elizabeth Becker with the 2022 Goldsmith Award for “YOU DON’T BELONG HERE: How Three Women Rewrote the Story of War.”

Here is a unique and valuable perspective on the Vietnam War….their work, in Becker’s description, ‘eschewed classic heroics, recording both the courage and the human toll of war, earning the amazed respect of soldiers, and making an indelible contribution to our understanding of the war, then and now.

Mark Bowden

Author of Black Hawk Down and Hue 1968

Elizabeth Becker has that rare ability to weave the fascinating stories of three ground-breaking, very different women journalists with a riveting history of the Vietnam War. She challenges you to see who these women were in a place they allegedly didn’t belong, while describing what and how they witnessed it.

Anne Garrels

Former NPR foreign correspondent and author of Naked in Baghdad

Elizabeth Becker’s luminous book not only belongs, it demands at last that these daring, resourceful, and pathbreaking women take their rightful place in the history of the Indochina wars and journalists who covered them.

David Maraniss

Author of They Marched into Sunlight: War and Peace, Vietnam and America, October 1967

Elegant, angry and utterly engaging, it is a long overdue story about a small band of courageous and visionary women. You Don’t Belong Here is a masterpiece of a book.

Rachel Louise Snyder

Author of No Visible Bruises

A riveting read with much to say about the nature of war and the different ways men and women correspondents cover it. Frank, fast-paced, often enraging, You Don’t Belong Here speaks to the distance traveled and the journey still ahead.

Geraldine Brooks

Pulitzer Prize-winning author of March