“Flickers of Sunshine”

New Zealander John Borrell spent 25 years as a foreign correspondent for some of the world’s best known broadcasters, newspapers and magazines. They include Time magazine for which he was successively bureau chief for Africa, the Middle East, Latin America and Eastern Europe and the Balkans. After reporting on the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe, Borrell started a new life in Poland. In the same spirit of adventure as he’d approached journalism, he built a now iconic lodge on a lake in northern Poland and became a successful wine merchant, newspaper publisher and exporter of his own brand of vodka.  He reflects on this in an earlier memoir, The White Lake, also published in Polish as Nad Jeziorem Bialym.  Now in Flicker of Sunshine,  he looks  back on his life as a foreign correspondent during the final decades of print journalism’s golden era before the internet shrank the world and shriveled attention spans and newspaper revenues.

‘Flickers of Sunshine’ is a foreign correspondent’s finely-drawn and reflective chronicle of a dizzying panoply of adventures in Africa, the Middle East, Central America and Eastern Europe. It touches too on the perennial conflict between the allure and pressures of a correspondent’s globe-trotting life and the personal dramas playing out in its shadows. They’re as compelling as any frontline dispatch.

Alan Cowell, author and former New York Times correspondent.