Cabbages and Kings

Cliff Lonsdale became a journalist while still in high school in Southern Rhodesia in the early 1960s. At 17, during a school vacation, he hitch-hiked into the former Belgian Congo, escaping death by ambush on the way, to write for his local paper about daily life in Elizabethville after three years of civil war.

His subsequent career in print, radio and television around the world was marked by further risk-taking of many kinds. As he turns 80, he reveals the knife-point sexual assault he had suffered at 16, before a cheering crowd, after arguing forcefully in a school debate in favour of multiracial education in segregated Southern Rhodesia. Cabbages and Kings - described by an early reviewer as "gripping stuff" - deals with the influence that assault had on his event-filled life, such as smuggling a radio documentary out of Moscow for a BBC colleague under the eyes of Soviet authorities. It reveals, as well, instances of intergenerational trauma he has tracked down in earlier members of his extraordinary family.

Another early reviewer declared: "I read it all at one go. Couldn't put it down."

Cliff Lonsdale is a former Chief News Editor for CBC Television and a founder of The Canadian Journalism Forum on Violence and Trauma, a charity dedicated to the safety and well-being of journalists, those on whom they report, and news consumers. All royalties from this book will be donated to further the Forum's work.