Description
A Danger Shared provides a searing visual history of Asia during World War II as seen by foreign correspondent Melville Jacoby.
In this meticulously curated collection of never-before-seen images, readers experience glamorous Macau soirรฉes, visit Guangxi farms, and witness wartime Chongqingโs wreckage and resilience. Along the way, Jacoby treats Filipino fishermen and Hanoi flower-sellers with the same care as the Soong sisters, Chiang Kai-Shek, and other icons.
Through scenes of everyday friendship, toil, and commerce alongside bombed classrooms, anxious refugees, and exhausted soldiers, A Danger Shared documents humanityโs persistence at a cataclysmic historical moment.
About the author
Bill Lascher crafts stories about the intersection of people, history and place through meticulous research and immersive narrative. His interest in wartime Asia as witnessed by Melville Jacoby was first piqued after his grandmother โ Jacobyโs cousin โ shared a trove of Melโs original photographs and negatives from across East and Southeast Asia, 16mm home movies of pre-war Guangzhou and bomb-blasted Chongqing, handwritten letters, telegrams, and other artifacts. Picking up the thread, Lascher spent five years tracing Melโs story through archival and private collections, interviews, and other sources across the United States, China, Hong Kong and the Philippines to produce his 2016 biography of Jacoby, Eve of a Hundred Midnights: The Star-Crossed Love Story of Two World War II Correspondents and their Epic Escape Across the Pacific (William Morrow). Described by reviewers as โgripping, impressively researchedโ and โpropulsive,โ Eve of a Hundred Midnights chronicled Melโs transition from exchange student to wartime foreign correspondent as well as his romance with MGM screenwriter-turned-journalist Annalee Whitmore Jacoby.
Lascherโs freelance work has appeared in magazines, newspapers, journals, broadcast outlets and podcasts, including Atlas Obscura, American History Tellers, The Guardian, The Oregonian, Next City, The Magazine, Boom: A Journal of California, Oregon Public Broadcasting, Portland Monthly and Pacific Standard. His most recent book is The Golden Fortress: Californiaโs Border War on Dust Bowl Refugees (Chicago Review Press), about a spotlight-hungry Los Angeles police chiefโs deployment of armed officers to Californiaโs borders to block poor migrants from entering the state during the Great Depression.
Inspired by Mel Jacobyโs photojournalism during the war, Lascher has a growing interest in analog photography and shooting, developing, printing, and preserving film in a digital world. His website is www.lascheratlarge.com.
