September 07, 2011

Contact:   Bill Giduz

Sebastian Junger in the "Restrepo" outpost

Davidson College invites the public to a talk on Tuesday, September 20, by acclaimed combat photojournalist and author Sebastian Junger. Junger will deliver the college's annual Reynolds Lecture on "The Front Lines of History: Twenty Years of Reporting from Around the World" beginning at 7:30 p.m. in Duke Family Performance Hall.

There is no charge to attend the lecture, but tickets are required and may be picked up at the Alvarez College Union ticket office from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. weekdays, and beginning one hour prior to the lecture if they remain. For information call the ticket office at 704-894-2135. A reception and book signing will follow the lecture.

Junger's book The Perfect Storm remained on The New York Times best-seller list for more than three years, and became a major motion picture. His other books include A Death in Belmont and Fire.

Junger has also reported on war in Liberia, Sierra Leone and Afghanistan. For more than a year, he and photojournalist Tim Hetherington (who recently died covering the war in Libya) embedded with a combat team in the heavily contested Korengal valley of eastern Afghanistan. Junger spent weeks at a time at a remote outpost that endured more combat than almost any other part of the country. He wrote about that experience in a book titled "WAR," and produced from the experience a documentary titled Restrepo that won the 2010 Grand Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival and has been aired on the National Geographic Channel.

Junger's earlier reporting on Afghanistan in 2000 became the subject of the National Geographic documentary "Into the Forbidden Zone." In 2001, he covered the Afghan war as a special correspondent for ABC News and Vanity Fair. His work has also been published in Harper's, The New York Times Magazine, National Geographic Adventure, Outside, and Men's Journal.

Davidson is a highly selective independent liberal arts college for 1,900 students located 20 minutes north of Charlotte in Davidson, N.C. Since its establishment in 1837 by Presbyterians, the college has graduated 23 Rhodes Scholars and is consistently regarded as one of the top liberal arts colleges in the country. Through The Davidson Trust, the college became the first liberal arts institution in the nation to replace loans with grants in all financial aid packages, giving all students the opportunity to graduate debt-free. Davidson competes in NCAA athletics at the Division I level, and a longstanding Honor Code is central to student life at the college.
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