The First Casualty (1975)

The history of the war correspondent, starting with William Howard Russell's Crimean dispatches for The Times and running through every major conflict since. Knightley, who spent twenty years at The Sunday Times, is unsentimental about the trade, as the book's subtitle suggests by casting reporters as heroes, propagandists and myth-makers. The first edition stopped at Vietnam; later revisions carry it on to Iraq, so look for the most recent one.