Rating: 
Summary: A Young Woman's Search for Adventure -- And Herself
Review: I am not quite sure how to describe this book. It is about photograhy in the sense that a young woman from a suburb of Washington, DC goes off to Paris to pursue a career in photojournalism. Kogan wants excitement and finds herself making photos of wars and meeting a variety of men. In time she finds what is important to her and that is the most worthwhile part of her story. The references to Leica and Nikon equipment are enjoyable and right on the mark for those who enjoy photography. This is not grand literature but it provides insights into finding oneself and what it is like to be a novice photojournalist.
Rating: 
Summary: over rated
Review: Well I must agree with those 1 star reviews. This woman seemed to be on a personal sex quest and brags about it. How boring. Her pictures lack emotion as well. Too bad a woman couldn't bring more light to this subject other than to tell us how many times she was raped. Please...get real.
Rating: 
Summary: More than most of us would tell our diaries
Review: SHUTTERBABE is one of the best books I've read. Period. It's factual, honest, frank, funny, and quick-moving. The author spends time telling us about herself because it's through her "lens" that the reader sees the situations described in the book. She is open about her past failures and modest about her triumphs, always crediting luck and fate more than her own superiority. I also appreciate the way she exposes journalism's dark side -- the fact that she had no control over how her pictures were used once she sent them (and her captions) to her agency, for example. Kogan sat down and wrote a personal, heart-felt account of the experiences she had in the male-dominated world of international war and drug photojournalism. She tells the reader more than most of us would tell our best friends or mothers, let alone our diaries. Her pictures are excellent, but her writing is even better. It's some of the best I've ever encountered. Women in their 30s will especially enjoy this book.
Rating: 
Summary: Want to waste a few hours of your life? Read this book.
Review: This book should be in the romance section, because the photography part is extraneous. The photojournalism parts were pretty good, but I couldn't stand wading through all the crap about who she's in love with or having ... with. In fact, I couldn't even finish the book because it ... me off. Gee, we're all really proud that you can stoop to the low level that men do and be as promiscuous as humanly possible. Way to go. By the way, no male I have ever known was as bad as this woman. Anyway, if you want to read a good book about a woman photographer, read the autobiography of Margaret Bourke-White. Her life was *amazing* and she speaks about her huge accomplishments with a great lighthearted air.
Rating:
Summary: Lighten up folks
Review: While I can see how some people would not love the woman at the focus of this book(remember, many of us were stupid, arrogant, self-centered at 22), I can't understand how that reduces the book's quality and value to one star. I enjoyed learning a great deal about photojournalism, political struggles in other nations, daily life in alien, unpredictable surroundings. I am a photographer and a traveler and identified strongly with many experiences. And while I very much enjoyed the book and am amazed at Kogan's ambition and motivation to do what she has done in the early years of her adulthood, I can't say that I agree with her choices, support her views. There's no need to judge this book's merit based on the personality of the narrator. The book maintains an enjoyable, conversational tone, some nice images, and lots of new information. It wasn't written to provide a feminist hero, a photographing saint.
Rating:
Summary: Appalling
Review: Kogan seems to want to be congratulated for using her sexuality to further her career as a photojournalist--and then for leaving her career in news behind so she can smugly reflect on her self-importance as a mother. This is really depressing for anyone who cares about women in the career of photojournalism, or about women who actually want to be judged on their work and intelligence rather than on their sexual availability and/or megalomania.
Rating:
Summary: Self-obsession without self-awareness
Review: I really don't understand all these glowing reviews. The small blurb in the "New Yorker" had this about right---something to the effect that there is little value in a memoir exhibiting self-obsession without self-awareness. Imagine that this was written by a male photo-journalist, and entitled, say, "Photostud." The narrator brags about his numerous "conquests" and "seductions" and writes in detail about the number of women he beds while covering exciting wars in exotic far-off places. He informs the reader that in college he "practically majored in the sport (of seduction)." He names his chapters not after the locations they purport to be about, but after the women with whom he is having sex at the time. He prides himself in the fact that he is able to seduce women with live-in boyfriends, but draws the line at married women. This would generate ridicule, at best, in the unlikely event it was even published, but this in reverse is what Ms. Kogan presents to us as an account of her relatively short career as a photojournalist. I was initially interested in the book as a feminist viewpoint on a notoriously male-dominated profession, but here the emphasis is definitely on the "babe" and not the journalist. The author ventures to Afghanistan, Zimbabwe, Romania and the USSR without the faintest notion of the politics, culture, history, or language of the countries she visits, and worse, seems proud of it. One comes from this book without any sense of where she stands on the issues behind the news events she photographs, and convinced that she could not care less about the people or places she visits, except for the men she beds. For example, in Afghanistan, she is led off the beaten track to pee by a nameless mujahideen, who steps on a mine and has his leg almost blown off. It has to be amputated. A few pages later, here is the author describing Afghanistan to a guy she hopes to seduce: "You want to know why Afghanistan was so horrible? There was this guy..." She's not talking about the permanently maimed soldier, but about a creepy and violent French journalist whom she accompanied to the country, and who not surprisingly soon betrays her and everyone else in sight in short order. She is so ill-informed that she travels to Zimbabwe expecting to cover a war, which turns out to be a local action against some game poachers. When she succeeds in getting a photo of a killed poacher, he is treated as merely a photo opportunity, without any reflection on how the economic conditions there force these hard choices. This has got to be the most comically and infuriatingly self-absorbed narrator since "Pale Fire"'s Charles Kinbote. The last fifty pages or so, when she ditches journalism for the bliss of married life and motherhood, should come with a high sugar content warning. As one might expect, the prose style throughout is on the level of a badly-written high-school confessional. I'm glad I picked this one up at the library.
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Summary: Life Imitates Art
Review: Well, I did enjoy this quite a bit, except for the last chapters. Someone I know had said that the ending of the book was questionable. I started the book, I couldn't put it down. At the beginning I thought Kogan was a bit precious (and I worried why she titled the book what she did, and that turned out to be fine), but I warmed to her, and her life, and her struggles. I knew ahead of time that she was going to get to the "staying home and making babies is the answer to everything" point at the end (this is not a spoiler). After all that she had been through, I just didn't expect it to be so insipid when she did get to that point. But for the first time in a long time I wanted to throw a book across the room -- during the last 30 pages. Kogan has her own brand of feminism (whatever suits her at the time). She was a self-professed adrenaline junkie, wanting adventure, and not wanting to be treated differently as a woman. By the end I felt like she had jumped up on a soapbox and started whining -- of course she wanted be treated differently, she wanted to be treated as a Mommie. Sure, people change, they grow up, they want different things as they approach their thirties. But after a couple hundred pages of a life well lived, all she wants is an expensive baby carriage and a baby to go in it. I would have been fine with this had it not become so loopy. I don't begrudge her her happiness, and I understand that parenthood is the pinnacle of existance for many, but an editor should have had a heavier hand towards the end. The bulk of the book is a very readable, very honest and insighful account of someone looking for meaning. I was touched by her experience, and the people in her life. And the bulk of the book was well worth reading. She never really was out to save the world with photography, but she wrote/worried about photographs being or becoming boring. She worried about this in her own work. Ultimately her life (and the book) did the same. For all her philosophy about the world around her she doesn't seem to really integrate that all those adventures and misadventures are what made her who she is. And instead of those events becoming a prelude to the next stage of her life they come off in the end as more of an extended post-college world tour to be put behind her. This, in my mind, defeats the purpose.
Rating:
Summary: Thank You Deb-ra
Review: Wow! I've just finnished. Shutterbabe is the first book I've pulled an all-nighter for in over a decade. Once I started reading, it was as if I'd contracted a fever. A fever which could not break until I had read the very last line of the story, and then the last line of the acknowledgements. Both of these last lines brought me to tears. Honesty is beautiful and Deborah Copaken Kogan is honest without being tedious. The internal dialogue of her evolving maturation keeps pace with, and is just as interesting as the alternatively dangerous and dull life she lived as a photojournalist. I sighed with relief when she gave up covering wars and cringed with her when she found herself once more in the fray despite her intentions. Never afraid of telling about egg in the face, literally or figuratively, I was ready to lick hers with affection like Julian's puppy by the end of the book. Shutterbabe is wonderful. Thanks Deborah. (Julian is an English journalist living and working in Africa to whom the author is attracted in the days before covering 'Operation Stronghold' in Mana Pools National Park, Zimbabwe.)
Rating:
Summary: Honesty sells
Review: A truly brave and honest first-person account of this woman's life as a photojournalist. The unique way she wove her story through the lenses of her lovers was a stroke of brilliance. And she has guts to say war is an adrenalin rush for journalists of all ilk and also is able to talk about men in a way that is refreshing and honest. This total warts and all account of a life lived without a lot of B.S. yet without resorting to becoming a jerk is truly a gem.
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