Publishers Weekly
07/10/2023
Historian Conant (The Great Secret) delivers an engrossing portrait of “nervy and relentless” war correspondent Marguerite Higgins (1920–1966). An only child of “Irish-French-Hong Kong heritage,” Higgins launched her career at UC Berkeley’s Daily Cal, garnered one of only 11 seats reserved for women at Columbia’s School of Journalism, and, as the second female reporter brought on staff at the New York Herald Tribune, traveled to Europe in 1944. Upon witnessing the dire results of Nazi “sadism and mass murder,” including at the liberation of Dachau in 1945, Higgins swore to report on injustice everywhere. As Berlin bureau chief, she covered the Nuremberg trials in 1947. During the Korean War, she went on assignment as “the only woman at the... front,” carrying only “a towel, toothbrush and lipstick”; her reporting there earned her recognition as outstanding woman reporter of the year at the New York Newspaperwomen club’s 1950 “Front Page” dinner, among other accolades. Her career also included 10 trips to Vietnam at the height of that conflict. Much of the book is devoted to Higgins’s private life, including her 1952 marriage to Gen. Bill Hall, which brought her to Washington, D.C., where she became part of John F. Kennedy’s inner circle. Propulsive and high-spirited, this is a riveting depiction of a larger-than-life trailblazer. Photos. (Oct.)
New York Times Book Review
"The glamorous, accomplished 20th-century war journalist Higgins—a Pulitzer winner with a nose for news and the nerve to chase it at any cost—gets her due in this lively biography."
Terry McDonell
"Fierce Ambition is a reflection of journalism, hung on the passionate, brilliant, sexy, hilarious, honest, complicated, moving, tough, heartbreaking outrageous, courageous, astonishing life of the intrepid ‘girl’ war correspondent Maggie Higgins. Slam! Bang! Kapow! If you’re a journalist and you’re not reading Fierce Ambition you’re not doing your homework."
Gay Talese
"The remarkable story of an irrepressible wartime reporter who would do almost anything to get a scoop. Beautiful, brilliant, and demanding, Maggie Higgins was a comet in the gray, male world of mid-twentieth-century American journalism captured in all of her complexity by Jennet Conant in her utterly compelling Fierce Ambition."
Cynthia McFadden
"No one who reads the first chapter will be able to set this book aside, rich as it is in rare insights and high drama. Fierce Ambition left me believing that if Maggie Higgins could have selected her biographer it would have been Jenny Conant."
Helene Stapinski
"Higgins’s life is now rendered in full, no longer lost to the march of male-dominated history."
Mimi Swartz
"Doggedly reported, incisive, and one fabulous ride, Fierce Ambition shows us a Maggie Higgins who is bold, shrewd, and indomitable, a role model not just for aspiring journalists but for fearless women of every stripe."
Richard Cohen
"Maggie Higgins lived life at a gallop and this book keeps up with her…Jenny Conant tells the whole story with verve, insight, and deep appreciation for this fascinating, complex, and pioneering woman."
WABC-TV - Sandy Kenyon
"Kept me turning the pages because this true story is more compelling than most novels.... A tale of triumph over almost insurmountable odds."
Janine di Giovanni
"Jennet Conant’s brilliant storytelling and extraordinary granular research bring Maggie Higgins’s long-forgotten but vital story to life…Her fearless quest to bring the truth to light will serve as inspiration for a new generation of pathfinding women. What a woman, what a legend."
Wall Street Journal - Andrew Nagorski
"[A] mesmerizing, meticulously researched biography.... Higgins was only 45 when she died on Jan. 3, 1966. Ms. Conant’s book has brought her back to life."
Wall Street Journal
[A] mesmerizing, meticulously researched biography.”
Kirkus Reviews
2023-08-12
The eventful life of an intrepid journalist.
Conant offers a brisk, richly detailed biography of acclaimed reporter Marguerite Higgins (1920-1966), the first woman to receive a Pulitzer Prize for foreign correspondence, for reporting on the Korean War, one award among many others. Born in Hong Kong to an American aviator father and French mother, Higgins grew up in Oakland, California, itching to escape. In 1937, she entered the University of California, Berkeley, soon writing for the well-regarded college paper, the Daily Californian. Journalism, she decided, was to be her future. Arriving in New York in 1941, she enrolled in the Columbia School of Journalism, eager to find a job at a newspaper. She was hired by the New York Herald Tribune the following year, beginning a career that was as illustrious as it was controversial. Her enemies—and they were many—accused her of exploiting “her feminine charms to get ahead.” She was dogged by gossip and rumors of affairs wherever she was assigned. Conant acknowledges that Higgins liked sex but “courted fame more ardently than she ever did men.” She also courted risk, excitement, and the rush of danger. Reporting from Europe during World War II, she “loved the tension in the air, the lightning pace of events.” When Germany surrendered, she was one of the first reporters inside Dachau, shocked by the sight of more than 30,000 “half-starved, lice-infested, traumatized prisoners,” who ecstatically embraced the American liberators. She left with a new sense of mission, and her reporting took on “an undercurrent of gravity and moral responsibility.” Conant chronicles Higgins’ career in detail, including stints as the Tribune’s Berlin and Tokyo bureau chief; two marriages and motherhood; her close friendship with the Kennedys; and her ferocious drive. In 1950, a profile in Life made her “the most famous war correspondent in the world.”
An admiring, cleareyed portrait of an ambitious, successful woman.
