A Reporter's World

The young woman was alone, swimming off Big Sur in the wild Pacific. She dove, she floated, she played—she danced on the waves! To Wally Gordon, the coastal road he took that day, and the woman it led him to, was part of an unexpected vision that gave him "a morsel of hope for this troubled country."

In his half-century as a journalist, Gordon has reported on many of those troubles, as well as chronicling the infinite variety of human life, its vagaries, struggles, aspirations, triumphs, and defeats. Now, he has brought together the stories from those years that have meant the most to him. In A Reporter’s World: Passions, Places, and People, he shares a body of work has been both a craft and a profession, personal and universal, all filtered through Gordon’s own perspective and sensibilities. It is a compilation that speaks volumes about the world we have all lived through—and the unique mind and heart that here give it voice.

Wally Gordon writes, "Journalism, as I have always wanted to practice it, and sometimes succeeded in doing so, is a kind of dance on rough waves, a balancing act between observation and interpretation, between obscurity and involvement… Those stories that meant the most to me are those where I felt involved in the telling." In his series of essays A Reporter's World: Passions, Places, and People, journalist Wally Gordon explores his emotional, intellectual, and political involvement in the people and vistas he has experiences throughout his career. Gordon, a journalist who has covered a myriad of topics from the Watergate Scandal in Washington, D.C. to potential nuclear disasters in New Mexico, delights in sharing his adventures – and misadventures – with readers. A Reporter's World is marked by clean, evocative prose and Wally Gordon's defining axiom – words are power. Each vignette is laced with reflection and impressions on the controversial social, environmental, and political evolutions to which Gordon has been witness. Central to A Reporter's World are Gordon's reflections on the Rio Grande River and the symbiotic societies that line it; the United States' relationship to conquest; the disconnect between the land and the politics attempting to dominate it; New Mexico's economic disparities; and, ultimately, the impermanence of the things we cherish.