Tom Downey
Travel Blog • Jim Benning • 07.11.06 | 1:31 AM ET
Tom Downey writes about the worlds of Brooklyn firemen, Yemeni jihadis, Malagasy river guides, Barcelona private eyes—anyone whose story moves him. A year before 9/11, Downey began shooting a television documentary and later wrote a book about a group of elite rescue firemen in Bed Stuy, Brooklyn. Downey’s nonfiction narrative The Last Men Out: Life on the Edge at Rescue 2 Firehouse (Henry Holt, 2004) follows 10 years in the life of their company, from the high of knocking down a wall of flames to the low of losing a brother. Downey now writes for a variety of publications including Rolling Stone, The New York Times, Slate, Condé Nast Traveler and Men’s Journal. Notable recent articles include The Insurgent’s Tale for Rolling Stone in which Downey profiles a jihadi he met in Yemen who fought with bin Laden in Afghanistan and al-Zirqawi in Iraq. “The Insurgent’s Tale” was selected for The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2006. Downey’s The Case of the Missing Angulas: A Barcelona Mystery for Condé Nast Traveler is Downey’s first in a series of fictional mystery stories in graphic novel form that take readers into the heart of a great city. Downey has worked as a freelance documentary producer for Discovery International and the Open Society Institute, a job that has brought him to locales as exotic as Haiti, Kazakhstan, Moldova, Mongolia and the Bronx. He studied English literature at Princeton University, spent a semester abroad at the American University in Cairo, and taught filmmaking at a film school in Singapore.
Dispatches:
* Sleepless in Rangoon
Q&A:
* Tom Downey on the Graphic Travel Story
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Jim Benning is the editor and co-founder of World Hum.
