"Out in the great wide world, foreign reporting can be depressingly narrow, especially in the post-9/11 climate. Sometimes it seems as if there are only two possible subjects for stories: people we should fear and people we should pity. But those aren't the individuals I met while living abroad." --Peter Hessler, Strange Stones: Dispatches from...

"One challenge for a foreign correspondent is to figure out how much of yourself to include: If the story is too self-centered, it becomes a tourist's diary. These days, the general trend is to reduce the writer's presence, often to the point of invisibility. This is the standard approach of newspapers, and it's described as...

A couple of weeks ago I offered signed copies of my two books as a holiday gift option; today I want to share a few other gift ideas. Each year publishers and gear companies send me far more books and equipment than I can review here -- but a lot of what I get turns...