Chicago's South Side to Castro's Havana

Georgie Anne Geyer was one of the first American women to file frontline reporting from revolutions, war zones, and guerrilla territory for a major daily newspaper. This is her memoir.

From the city desk of the Chicago Daily News to datelines around the world, Geyer pushed past the women's pages and into foreign correspondence at a time when the beat was almost entirely closed to women. The first in her family to attend college, she left Chicago's South Side for Latin America in the early 1960s and never stopped traveling.

Buying the Night Flight gathers her reporting from Guatemala, where she trekked into the rainforest to interview leftist guerrillas, and Cuba, where she was among the first foreign reporters to sit down with Fidel Castro. From there the book moves through Egypt, the Soviet Union, Cambodia, and dozens of other datelines, covering heads of state, dissidents, soldiers, exiles, and the ordinary villagers Geyer often found more revealing than the leaders themselves.

Alongside the reporting runs her own story: how a young woman talked, traveled, and worked her way into a profession long dominated by men, earning recognition from her male colleagues one assignment at a time. She writes with humor, candor, and a working reporter's eye for the detail that explains a country.

This is a primary-source view of a generation of upheaval, written by a reporter who was inside the room.