After 3 Decades Of National News Don Dahler Shares The Journey In Souvenirs From An Absurd Life

Arroe Collins: Unplugged & Totally Uncut

For the past three decades, Don Dahler has been a fixture on national network news covering the world's biggest stories-global wars, presidential elections, school shootings, natural disasters. Now, drawn from the journals he kept for most of his life, Don charts his unlikely rise from a teenage runaway to an award-winning correspondent and anchor in SOUVENIRS FROM AN ABSURD LIFE (Post Hill Press, February 25, 2025). As a young man, chance encounters with baseball idol Mickey Mantle and legendary sports broadcaster Dick Enberg changed the trajectory of Don's life. Rejecting the prospects of a dim, boring, unfulfilling future, he set out to tell stories that mattered. He worked his way up from local TV stations in Texas and North Carolina and went on to cover the most important stories of the times for Fox News, CNBC, ABC News, and CBS News, reporting from more than 120 countries and often living abroad for months at a time. Don was the first network correspondent to report live from the scene on 9/11 and reported extensively from Afghanistan and Iraq in the months and years that followed. As a documentary filmmaker he traveled to Calcutta, Johannesburg, Taipei, and thousands of places in between. He's interviewed Nobel Prize recipients, future presidents, Olympic champions, and countless movie stars. He's been shot (twice), had lions stalk outside his tent in Africa, tamed a wild fruit bat, and flown in an ultralight airplane over the heads of elephants. These and more incredible adventures are collected in SOUVENIRS FROM AN ABSURD LIFE, a memoir that is full of humor, heart, and grit-and also nine-lives-level luck and good timing. Don's insider's account of the highly competitive world of network news also revisits a bygone era of broadcast journalism-one with robust budgets and an appetite for foreign reporting. And he reveals which stars aren't who they pretend to be, how his reporting on 9/11 was co-opted by conspiracy theorists, and what goes on behind the scenes of the country's powerful media channels.
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