Anthology Part 1: Alagiah and Herbert, witnessing hard truths

Form: autobiographical writing by a BBC journalist (published 2001).
Content: Alagiah remembers reporting on the famine and civil war in Somalia in the early 1990s. He describes the suffering he saw and admits that journalists can become hardened, always searching for a more shocking image.
Key moment: a man in a village gives him a small, embarrassed smile. Alagiah reads it as a sign of the man's dignity and of the huge gap between the reporter, who can leave, and the people he films, who cannot. The smile stays with him long after.
Methods: vivid, often disturbing description; lists; contrast between the observer and the observed; a reflective, questioning ending.

Form: travel writing and memoir. Herbert is the daughter of the polar explorer Wally Herbert and spent part of her childhood in Greenland.
Content: she watches Inuit hunters in kayaks hunting narwhals in the Arctic. Part of her hopes the narwhals will escape, yet she understands that hunting is necessary for the community to survive in a harsh environment, and that the hunters follow traditional rules.
Methods: striking imagery of light, ice and sea; facts about narwhals and the community woven into description; local words left untranslated, which draw the reader into the culture; a shifting perspective that shows her divided feelings.