RaveLos Angeles Review of Books... gripping ... a well-crafted true story ... It is no easy feat to weave six lives into a narrative that compels the reader all the way through, but like a big-canvas painting that brings together personal dramas and machinations of state, The Correspondents is full of intriguing detail. Structurally, it covers the revolving cast with near-equal focus, with Virginia Cowles’s story serving as a connecting thread. Though the book is occasionally head-spinning in its various layers, with each reporter’s timeline tracking against global events, Mackrell is concise with context, sticking to major tactical moves and the waves of optimism and pessimism that animated the Allies ... the abiding value of The Correspondents is in its gathering of six experiences that shows their commonalities and divergences. Through this framing, a picture of a shared endeavor comes into focus, while individual contributions and preoccupations are less prone to exaggeration or psychoanalysis. This is especially fitting given that these particular subjects did not tend to write in the first person: as professional witnesses, they saw others, not themselves, as the true protagonists.
