American journalist Martha Gellhorn witnessed the major military conflicts of the 20th century: from the Spanish Civil War to World War II, from the Soviet-Finnish War to the Arab-Israeli War, and from the American invasion of Vietnam to the conflicts in El Salvador and Nicaragua in the 1980s.

Despising the lies of official press releases, Gellhorn ventured into the heart of the action, engaging with soldiers, the wounded, and refugees, and wrote about how war appears to ordinary people caught in its grasp.

Her collection of reports, "The Face of War," covering nearly fifty years of bloodshed and unsuccessful attempts to establish lasting peace, is a sharp, slap-in-the-face statement on the state of humanity, remaining relevant even half a century later.