without one’s even having to bestir oneself

[Quang Hai]

[FONT=&quot]I am reading A trip to Hanoi by S. Sontag. There is a sentence I do not understand so please enlighten me the meaning of underlined word:

"In my own case, several years of reading and of viewing newsreels had furnished a large portfolio of miscellaneous images of Vietnam: napalmed corpses, live citizens on bicycles, the hamlets of thatched huts, the razed cities like Nam Dinh and Phu Ly, the cylindrical, one-person bomb shelters spaced along the sidewalks of Hanoi, the thick yellow straw hats worn by schoolchildren as protection against fragmentation bombs. (Indelible horrors, pictorial and statistical, supplied by courtesy of television and [/FONT]The New York Times and Life, without one’s even having to bestir oneself to consult the frankly partisan books of Wilfred Burchett or the documentation assembled by the Russell Foundation’s International War Crimes Tribunal.) But the confrontation with the originals of these images didn’t prove to be a simple experience; actually to see and touch them produced an effect both exhilarating and numbing. Matching concrete reality with mental image was at best a mechanical or merely additive process, while prying new facts from the Vietnamese officials and ordinary citizens I was meeting was a task for which I’m not particularly well equipped."

Thanks.

 

[emsr2d2]

I am reading A trip to Hanoi by S. Sontag. Please enlighten me as to the meaning of the underlined [STRIKE]word[/STRIKE] sentence:

Have you looked up the meaning of "bestir"? What did you find?

 

[PeterCW]

As a native speaker I had to read the passage twice to make sense of it.