Scott Taylor – publisher, journalist, and all-around action figure – is best known these days for his military punditry on television. Back in the 1990s, though, he made his mark with impassioned investigations into corruption and incompetence in the senior ranks of the Canadian officer corps and their betrayal of the common solider. As a freelance journalist, Taylor has travelled to all the post-Cold War hotspots – the Balkans, Iraq, Afghanistan – filing hard-line dispatches or publishing his experiences through his own imprint. As a result, Taylor has a fan base – subscribers to
Esprit de Corps (a soldiering magazine that he edits), honest folk, iconoclasts, the downtrodden, and those perennially suspicious of subtlety or the official line. These readers will not be disappointed with
Unembedded, a memoir of two decades spent revealing “the suffering of the vanquished that is rarely recorded by the victors.” The book reads as an extended adventure travelogue – the man knows how to spin a yarn – more or less framed by Taylor’s reporting. There can be no doubting Taylor’s courage or drive. He has gone places few would venture. More often than not he is travelling on scratch budgets, with no media conglomerate to bail him out of the trouble he so often encounters. The most harrowing example of such trouble came in 2004, when Taylor was kidnapped and tortured in Iraq for five days. Taylor’s writing falls decidedly into commentary rather than reportage.
Unembedded, like his previous works, is short on corroboration and devoid of annotation, while at the same time brimming with unequivocal opinion – opinion occasionally lifted almost verbatim from his previous books. If you like your action figures brave, driven, opinionated, and self-absorbed, then Scott Taylor is your man.
"The book's title refers to the practice of 'embedding' reporters with military units. Journalists live with the soldiers in the field, depend on them for their safety, and, if their handlers do their job properly, see and report just what the military wants them to...
Taylor has long refused to stay with the media tour, and made a point of interviewing the 'enemy', whether Serb, Iraqi or Taliban." (
Metro News 20090216)
"Throughout the book,
Taylor resists the black and white morality plays often seen in the mainstream media. He refuses to present complex issues in terms of good guys and bad guys. A compelling read,
Unembedded also offers nuanced explanations of both the history and multifarious aspects of the many conflicts he has covered." (
Waterloo Region Record 20090227)
"
Unembedded is an unforgettable, in-your-face reminder that there is more to the war in Iraq than what most Americans see on the nightly news; and it isn't pretty. This book is not neutral, nor does it pretend to be. Rather, it is an impassioned response by its author to the Pentagon's 'embedded' version of events." (
National Post 20090306)
"If you like your action figures brave, driven, [and] opinionated...then
Scott Taylor is your man." (
Quill & Quire 20090324)
"Maverick is an overused label, but in
Scott Taylor's case it only partly describes the man. He has been an artist, a musician, a professional soldier and, since 1988, editor and publisher of the Ottawa-based military magazine Esprit de Corps. He's part pragmatist, part romantic, part journalist, part author and, for reasons even he might not totally understand, a man addicted to danger." (
Edmonton Journal 20090208)
"Most western journalists covering the Iraq and Afghanistan conflicts are embedded, which means they operate under the protection, guidance and watchful eyes of their country's military. It also means that despite their best efforts, reports are inevitably one-sided.
Taylor is graceful in his dissent but obviously doesn't like that sort of arrangement. 'The dangers of being embedded are real,' he said in an interview. 'You can get hurt. But if you're not getting both sides of the story, you're not getting the whole story.'" (
Ottawa Citizen 20090228)
"
Unembedded is such a compelling read that the 360-page ride from part one of his kidnapping saga to the dramatic conclusion seems no distance at all." (
Calgary Herald 20090314)
"With
Unembedded,
Scott Taylor has given us a warning of what will happen if we don't ask tough questions or hold people to account. Sometimes you have to get off the media bus and go see for yourself." (
Canadian Newsblog 20090324)
"Hats off to the man's lunatic courage.
Scott Taylor is extraordinarily brave, and like many extraordinarily brave war correspondents, his courage allows him to meet people and tell stories that most pretty brave war correspondents never get to tell...Who cares if he's not Proust...You're not reading
Unembedded...for the lush prose; you're reading it for the ripping yarns and the insight into forgotten worlds, and boy, once they get going, do the yarns rip." (
Globe & Mail 20090319)
"This is
Scott Taylor against the world, boasting that he makes his own way through the hellholes of the world without the constant protection of friendly troops enjoyed by embedded journalists. The book opens vividly...[and] repeatedly roars back to life with war stories so detailed that the reader can smell the blood...
Taylor's willingness to interrogate himself, to examine his activities and motivations -- a kind of courage often missing in the action of this genre -- is the enduring strength of
Unembedded." (
Winnipeg Free Press 20090328)
"
Taylor is willing to accept risks that confine many modern-day war correspondents to hotel rooms of the supervision of official handlers, and
Unembedded gives a clear idea of what's at stake when a reporter plots his own course through a war zone." (
Georgia Straight 20090403)
"
Scott Taylor has been an artist, musician, soldier and, since 1988, editor and publisher of the Ottawa-based military magazine Esprit de Corps. He's been pilloried as an amateur glory seeker and worse, but a 20-year record shows an often brave, principled man. He's been in and out of Iraq and Afghanistan dozens of times, both pre-and postwar, and has in recent times traveled in Afghanistan." (
National Post 20091128)
"From his battles with the Department of National Defence and his side of the Airborne saga to independent reporting in Kuwait, Cambodia, Western Sahara, Croatia, Bosnia, Serbia, Kosovo, Iraq and Afghanistan,
Taylor consistently aligns himself against the official line and the pack consensus." (
Esprit de Corps 20090421)
