Martha Gellhorn, reporter, traveller, fiction writer, was one tough
cookie. At the age of 21, she decided '...to see everywhere and
everything and everyone and write about it.' Despite a privileged
background and education, that is precisely what she did, embarking
on a chosen life of risk and adventure, continually on the move,
with stays in 53 countries. In this book, we find Gellhorn
reconstructing five gripping journeys. Modestly, Gellhorn writes
that she is an 'amateur' rather than an erudite traveller and
claims that travellers' tales bore ordinary people unless they are
tales of disaster. She calls this book '...not a proper travel
book,' but 'an account of my best horror journeys ... recollected
with tenderness now they are past.' She begins with an account of a
trip to China in 1941 during the Sino-Japanese War with her
then-husband Ernest Hemingway (the 'Other' of the title, here also
called 'U.C.' or 'Unwilling Companion'), then there are journeys to
the war-torn Caribbean in 1942, East Africa in 1962, Israel in 1971
(an acerbic look at hippies) and Moscow in 1972. Gellhorn writes in
a pared-down, fast moving style, skilfully recreating sights,
sounds and smells (often unpleasant!). The attraction of her
writing is in her investigation of the gaps between the dream of
travelling and the reality. She says her own desire to travel began
with her childhood fascination for the poetry of place names. When
she meets harsh reality on her travels, she shows a vast compassion
for sufferers of poverty and injustice, and, in spite of
everything, a continual hope for beauty. As the debris and sleaze
of modern mass tourism wash over her, she looks back to a life
lived on the edge. One tough cookie, one tough and tender book.
(Kirkus UK)
A brilliantly witty and intelligent memoir of the adventures,
discoveries, rescues, and narrow escapes of Martha Gellhorn, one of
America's most important war correspondents and the third wife of
Ernest Hemingway. "Gellhorn is incapable of writing a dull
sentence". The Times (London) "Martha Gellhorn was so fearless in a
male way, and yet utterly capable of making men melt", writes New
Yorker literary editor Bill Buford. As a journalist, Gellhorn
covered every military conflict from the Spanish Civil War to
Vietnam and Nicaragua. She also bewitched Eleanor Roosevelt's
secret love and enraptured Ernest Hemingway with her courage as
they dodged shell fire together. Hemingway is, of course, the
unnamed "other" in the title of this tart memoir, first published
in 1979, in which Gellhorn describes her globe-spanning adventures,
both accompanied and alone. With razor-sharp humor and exceptional
insight into place and character, she tells of a tense week spent
among dissidents in Moscow; long days whiled away in a disused
water tank with hippies clustered at Eilat on the Red Sea; and her
journeys by sampan and horse to the interior of China during the
Sino-Japanese War. Now including a foreward by Bill Buford and
photographs of Gellhorn with Hemingway, Dorothy Parker, Madame
Chiang Kai-shek, Gary Cooper, and others, this new edition
rediscovers the voice of an extraordinary woman and brings back
into print an irresistibly entertaining classic.
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