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Loading... Travels with myself and another (original 1978; edition 2001)by Martha Gellhorn
Work InformationTravels with Myself and Another: A Memoir by Martha Gellhorn (1978)
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Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. No current Talk conversations about this book. I have always been fond of Martha Gellhorn, as the only one of Ernest Hemingway's wives to give back to him as good - or perhaps better - than he dished out. She didn't like the fact that, after her marriage to Hemingway, her name was always linked with his. After reading her work, which in my opinion is just as good as his, I can understand her frustration. This book of her travel writings does include Hemingway, but he is not mentioned by name. Instead he is called UC for Unwilling Companion for the fact that he had not wanted to accompany her to China just before America's entry into World War II. Besides her trip to China, this volume also covers a trip around the islands of the Caribbean, Africa, and the Soviet Union. She looks at all the places she visits with a gimlet eye and through the prism of her own liberal political values. Written in the 1970's, some of her comments - especially about the people in Africa - are problematic viewed through today's sensibilities. However, the reader needs to take the times into account and not be too picky as there is too much to enjoy in this book. "I was in that state of grace which can rightly be called happiness, when body and mind rejoice totally together. This occurs, as a divine surprise, in travel; this is why I will never finish travelling." If you think Hemingway is a fearless adventurer, you must not be acquainted with Martha Gellhorn, a renowned war correspondent and his third wife. While a prolific journalist and lifelong traveler, Travels with Myself and Another is her first and only memoir which reflects on her experiences at any length. Spanning East Africa, Crete, Stalin-era USSR, and China during the second Sino-Japanese war, among others, and traveling via horseback, cargo planes, and ships transporting dynamite for the WWII Allied effort, Gellhorn's tales are as varied as they are ridiculous. Her reflections are evocative and inviting as she recalls endless mishaps, wrong turns, run ins with skin rot, and trash filled beaches. Gellhorn's memoir is a chronicle of her most memorable (read, disastrous) travels, often hilarious, always potently delivered. I have to admit I gave up on this book, although I had been greatly looking forward to it. The purpose, according to Gellhorn, is to recount "horror journeys" or the worst trips out of her many travels. But I don't get a clear enough sense of her point of view, and the anecdotes, written long after the fact, just lack richness for me. If one is interested in another side of Hemingway (the Another) maybe they would like this better. Okay, I tried it again a few months later and enjoyed it. You have to look past her prejudices and accept that you won't learn a lot about the places she goes to, but you will get little glimpses of travel in a particular time period. Her travel to Soviet Russia was particularly interesting. no reviews | add a review
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. "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. No library descriptions found. |
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Google Books — Loading... GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)910.92History and Geography Geography and Travel Geography and Travel History, geographic treatment, biography - Discovery. exploration Geographers, travellers, explorers regardless of country of originLC ClassificationRatingAverage:
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Her writing is clear, humorous and a joy to read. She easily depicts Africa as a lost continent, incapable of ruling themselves because the populations who lived there all their lives are ignorant. The Massi tribe is depicted as so very ugly that one has a difficult time looking at them. Made uglier by the long, deep groves of scars decorating their faces, she thinks they plead ignorance so they do not have to work.
The book begins with her journey to China, the weather is depicted as God awful hot, and the inhabitants were ignorant and small minded. Like the Soviet Union, she finds the government oppressive and crooked.
When I told a friend that she has a strong distaste for the ugly Massi tribe, my friend overreacted and said she would never read her books, and for that matter, I shouldn't either. When I tried to explain that books written in another time frame than current, are best read with an open mind, and the reader must take that into their view of what appears her sarcasm, prejudice, and loftier than thou perceptions, I was met with silence.
I very much liked this book. She writes with just enough description and feeling, that I was amazed at her ability to overcome many troublesome events. ( )