Podcast with Bill Lascher, author of “A Danger Shared: A Journalist’s Glimpses of a Continent at War”

Bill Lascher

Melville Jacoby was a US war correspondent during the Sino-Japanese War and, later, the Second World War, writing about the Japanese advances from Chongqing, Hanoi, and Manila. He was also a relative of Bill Lascher, a journalist—specifically, the cousin of Bill’s grandmother.

 

 

A Danger Shared: A Journalist’s Glimpses of a Continent at War, Bill Lascher, Melville Jacoby (photos), Paul French (foreword) (Blacksmith, April 2024)
A Danger Shared: A Journalist’s Glimpses of a Continent at War, Bill Lascher, Melville Jacoby (photos), Paul French (foreword) (Blacksmith, April 2024)

Bill has now collected Mel’s work in a book: A Danger Shared: A Journalist’s Glimpses of a Continent at War, with photos detailing Mel’s early days as an exchange student in China, then his later work as journalist … and propagandist for Chiang Kai-shek in wartime Chongqing, then as a correspondent for Time and Life in the Philippines right as the Japanese invade.

Bill is also the author of the 2016 book Eve of a Hundred Midnights: The Star-Crossed Love Story of Two World War II Correspondents and their Epic Escape Across the Pacific, also about Mel Jacoby and his wife Annalee Jacoby. He is also a freelance journalist.


Nicholas Gordon has an MPhil from Oxford in International Relations and a BA from Harvard. He is a writer, editor and occasional radio host based in Hong Kong.