Unreasonable Behavior

“Unsparing reminiscences that effectively combine the bittersweet life of a world-class photojournalist with a generous selection of his haunting lifework” (Kirkus Reviews). Revised and updated after twenty-five years, Unreasonable Behavior traces the life and career of one of the top photojournalists of the twentieth century and beyond. Born in London in 1935, Don McCullin worked as a photographer’s assistant in the RAF during the Suez Crisis. His early association with a North London gang led to the first publication of his pictures. As an overseas correspondent for the Sunday Times Magazine beginning in 1966, McCullin soon became a new kind of hero, taking a generation of readers beyond the insularity of post-war domestic life through the lens of his Nikon camera. He captured the realities of war in Biafra, the Congo, Vietnam, Cambodia, and elsewhere, and the human tragedy of famine and cholera on the Bangladesh border and later, the AIDs epidemic in Sub-Saharan Africa. Already in 1968, when the Beatles wanted new press shots, they asked for Don McCullin. Harrowing and poignant, Unreasonable Behavior is an extraordinary account of a witness who survived to tell his tale and triumphed over the memories that could have destroyed him. “[Don McCullin] has been forfeit more times than he can remember, he says. But he is not bragging. Talking this way about death and risk, he seems to be implying quite consciously that by testing his luck each time, he is testing his Maker’s indulgence.” —John le Carré “McCullin handles much of the material culled from his war experiences like a seasoned thriller writer. His dialogue is convincing and sharp.” —The Observer