Lost in the Stacks

I was brought to Gellhorn's writing after finishing The Postmistress, where Gellhorn gets a cameo and a few shout-outs for her war-reporting. They didn't have The Face of War at the local library, so I picked up this instead. This is probably the best travel memoir that I have ever read. Gellhorn is one pugnacious, brutally intelligent female with ovaries of steel. In Travels with Myself and Another: A Memoir, Gellhorn recounts her 'horror journeys': to the front of the Sino-Japanese war on the back of a miniature pony, straight through the heart of a cholera epidemic, riding shotgun in a tiny merchant vessel through U-boat infested waters of the Caribbean and then up the Saranoco (probably spelled that one wrong) River into the uncharted backlands of Suriname. She hires a driver and field guide in Kenya who can neither drive nor has ever left Nairobi to take her through the game parks of Kenya, Uganda and Tanganyika and sneaks stockings and detective thrillers to Mrs. Osip Mandelstam in Moscow. Rather than the stoic war reporter you might expect her to be, Gellhorn is filled with piss and vinegar at the injustice with which so many people in the world are treated AND the old cigarette butts that were left in her hotel room. She writes honestly, self-effacingly, and candidly. Not a sentence is out of place or boring. I am filled with an itch to travel after reading this wonderful book, and a quite separate itch to get my hands on the rest of Gellhorn's writing. Highly recommended for everyone.