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Ishmael Beah was born in Sierra Leone on November 23, 1980. When he was eleven, Ishmael's life, along with the lives of millions of other Sierra Leoneans, was derailed by the outbreak of a brutal civil war. After his parents and two brothers were killed, Ishmael was recruited to fight as a child soldier. He was thirteen. He fought for over two years before he was removed from the army by UNICEF and placed in a rehabilitation home in Freetown, the capital of Sierra Leone. After completing rehabilitation in late 1996, Ishmael won a competition to attend a conference at the United Nations to talk about the devastating effects of war on children in his country. It was there that he met his new mother, Laura Simms, a professional storyteller who lives in New York. Ishmael returned to Sierra Leone and continued speaking about his experiences to help bring international attention to the issue of child soldiering and war affected children.
In 1998 Ishmael came to live with his American family in New York City. He completed high school at the United Nations International School, and subsequently went on to Oberlin College in Ohio. Throughout his high school and undergraduate education, Ishmael continued his advocacy work to bring attention to the plight of child soldiers and children affected by war around the world, speaking on numerous occasions on behalf of Unicef, Human Rights Watch, United Nations Secretary General's Office for Children and Armed Conflict, at the United Nations General Assembly, serving on a UN panel with Secretary General Kofi Annan and discussing the issue with dignitaries such as Nelson Mandela and Bill Clinton. He is a member of the Human Rights Watch Children's Rights Division Committee.
In A Long Way Gone, Beah, now twenty-six years old, tells a riveting story. At the age of twelve, he fled attacking rebels and wandered a land rendered unrecognizable by violence. By thirteen, he'd been picked up by the government army, and Beah, at heart a gentle boy, found that he was capable of truly terrible acts. Eventually released by the army and sent to a UNICEF rehabilitation center, he struggled to regain his humanity and to reenter the world of civilians, who viewed him with fear and suspicion. This is, at last, a story of redemption and hope.
A frequent television commentator, Wright is also the acclaimed author of The Last Great Revolution: Turmoil and Transformation in Iran, Sacred Rage: The Wrath of Militant Islam, Flashpoints: Promise and Peril in a New World, and In the Name of God: The Khomeini Decade. She lives in Washington, D.C.
Since assuming the Logan Professorship, a half-time position, the U.C. Berkeley Investigative Reporting Program under Mr. Bergman's leadership has established its own offices which include the west coast editorial and production facilities for the PBS programs Frontline and Frontline/World. The offices also house the Investigative Reporting Post Graduate Fellows.
This newly inaugurated year-long program is without peer at any academic institution in the nation. It is designed to nurture young journalists who want to pursue a career in in-depth public service reporting by providing them with a salary, benefits and editorial guidance.
Bergman's career spans nearly four decades from the late 1960s for a weekly newspaper in San Diego to a freelancer for Ramparts Magazine and then as an editor of Rolling Stone. In 1976, he was part of a group of reporters who investigated the assassination of Don Bolles, a reporter for The Arizona Republic, and in 1977 he was a co-founder of The Center for Investigative Reporting.
From 1978 until 1983, Bergman was a producer, reporter, and then the Director of Investigative Reporting at ABC News. He was one of the original producers of "20/20."
In 1983, Bergman joined CBS News as a producer for the weekly news magazine "60 Minutes," where over the course of 14 years he produced more than 50 stories on subjects ranging from organized crime, international arms and drug trafficking, to terrorism, and corporate crime. The story of his investigation of the tobacco industry for 60 Minutes was chronicled in the Academy Award nominated feature film "The Insider".
After leaving CBS News as its senior investigative producer in 1998, he forged an alliance between The New York Times and the PBS documentary program "Frontline". The collaboration included the participation of his graduate students working both on the films and print stories as well as extensive web sites. Stories as part of this alliance included an investigation into corruption in Mexico, the East Africa bombings, the California energy crisis and the role of Enron, a series on the roots of 9/11, as well as subsequent stories on the terrorist threat inside the United States and Europe.
Working with his students, The New York Times and Frontline, Mr. Bergman reported award-winning investigations of the credit card business, and worker safety in the iron foundry industry.
He has received honors in both print and broadcasting, including the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service, awarded to The New York Times in 2004 for "A Dangerous Business," which detailed a record of egregious worker safety violations coupled with the systematic violation of environmental laws in the iron sewer and water pipe industry. That story, which appeared as both a print series and a documentary, is the only winner of the Pulitzer Prize to also be acknowledged with every major award in broadcasting.
The recipient of numerous Emmys, Mr. Bergman, as a reporter and producer, has been honored with five Alfred I. duPont-Columbia University silver and golden Baton awards, three Peabodys, a Polk Award, a Sidney Hillman award for labor reporting and the James Madison Freedom of Information Award for Career Achievement from The Society of Professional Journalists. Bergman graduated with honors from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1966 and was a graduate fellow in philosophy at the University of California, San Diego until 1970.
Lowell Bergman has lived for the last 35 years in Berkeley, California. He is married to Ms. Sharon Tiller, a senior producer with Frontline. The couple has five children and four grandchildren.
Recent Stories by Lowell Bergman include the Frontline program "News War," a four-part series that traces the history of American journalism from the Nixon administration's attacks on the media, to the post-Watergate popularity of the press, to the new challenges presented by the war on terror and other forces facing the free press. Another recent program, "The Enemy Within," which aired on Frontline and was published in The New York Times, details the federal government's multibillion dollar domestic counterterrorism efforts and whether the country is better prepared to prevent another catastrophic attack. The film and accompanying Web site and newspaper story were prepared with the assistance of students and alumni from Bergman's investigative reporting class.
