On the book review blog The Shepherd, Tim Hannigan lists The Vulnerable Observer as one of “The Best Books That Capture The Complexities Of Writing About The Real World”:
The Vulnerable Observer
By Ruth Behar
Why this book?
Ruth Behar is an academic, but this deeply personal book is nothing like your typical academic treatise. It’s part memoir, part essay collection, part manifesto for a more ethical – and more honest – way of recording the world and your own interactions with it. What Behar calls for is the “vulnerable observation” of the title: a recognition of the way your own personal and cultural baggage colours your way of seeing, and of the way that you, the writer, are always part of the story. What this leads to is the realisation that objectivity is not just unattainable, but probably undesirable. Behar aims her clarion call at her own profession, anthropology, but what she says applies as much to journalists, travel writers and anyone else who writes about the real world.