Still Time to Live

This first-ever biography of TIME-LIFE correspondent Jack Belden, who covered war and only war from China, Burma, North Africa and Europe in the 1930s and 1940s, is the fast-paced story of an American original. We see him jumping ship in Hong Kong at age 23 to report on the growing conflict between China and Japan, then fighting his way back to the front lines after being seriously wounded at Salerno, only to be wounded again, perhaps irreparably, by the ravages of McCarthyism. It is also the story of a young man falling in love with his American nurse in North Africa, losing track of her after the war and reconnecting with her again in Paris nearly 50 years later in the final few weeks of his life. His reporting resulted in three books -- "Still Time to Die," "Retreat With Stilwell," and "China Shakes the World," his classic account of the Chinese civil war. His friend and colleague Edgar Snow called him "mad and gifted." Wrote the Asia scholar Owen Lattimore: "Jack Belden was a legendary figure.... He was one of the great war correspondents.