On the Tip of a Pen

Milan Syruček has been in journalism for sixty-five years, mostly as a foreign policy reporter and commentator. He has travelled the world, meeting the foremost statesmen and politicians, scientists and artists of various countries. He was a direct participant in events that shaped the twentieth century, whether they were international conferences, summits, or armed conflicts and wars. Several times his life was at risk, whether on the front line, captured by the Tuaregs, or during the earthquake in Skopje. He not only described events, but in several secret missions, which he writes about for the very first time, he even helped to shape their course.
The memoirs are a unique testimony of a journalist who always wanted to be there when something was happening, whether it was Indochina, the Prague or Paris Spring of 1968, the Helsinki process, the Cuban revolution or anything else. He walked the Ho Chi Minh Trail, negotiated with Vietnamese officials, and was offered a military special by the Americans for a secret mission to Saigon. His travels around the world took him to royal and presidential palaces, but also to heavily guarded places, wild jungles and the Siberian taiga, beyond the Arctic Circle and into the tropical heat of Africa.
It is also a frank and open confession of a man who experienced various regimes, and who has the courage to tell how they shaped him and how he himself helped to shape them. A read that will leave no one cold.