Rating: WORTHY!
Martha Gellhorn is most often referred to, I have no doubt, as an ex-wife of Ernest Hemingway, like she has no existence apart from him, but she was a reporter who was in Madrid when the rebels were bombing it in the Spanish civil war; she went into Europe on D-Day or shortly thereafter, and was on the beach helping bring the wounded back to the hospital ship she was on while it was still being shelled. She reported on that war right to the end, and was present shortly after Dachau was liberated. After that, she had had enough of war and death, so she did not want to go to Korea, but she felt drawn back into things when the Vietnam war began. Her career spanned six decades and she died in '98 at 89. The Martha Gellhorn Prize for Journalism is named after her.
This book consists of a series of reports she sent back from her experiences, which were varied and often dangerous, and some of the stories are commented on in hindsight by the author. Her experience with Hemingway was a tiny part of this expanse of time. She met him in 1937 and they went to Spain together, and lived together on an off until marrying in 1940 after his divorce from Pauline Pfeiffer. They divorced in 1945, evidently because he could not stand that she also had a career. According to Wikipedia he once wrote to her asking, "Are you a war correspondent, or wife in my bed?" evidently convinced she couldn't be both, though he could. She apparently asked, "Why should I be merely a footnote in his life?" and refused to discuss her relationship with that dick whenever she was interviewed about her work. Good for her.
The stories she told were typically personal interest stories, although not typically about only one person, but about many - sharing the same experiences under fire or impoverished by war. She wrote well and was a very descriptive and evocative author. The book contains three of her reports on the civil war in Spain, two on the Russian attacks on Finland, one on the war in China fending off the Japanese, twelve on World War Two, including one on the Nuremberg trials and one on Dachau. She covers ongoing conflicts which everyone who faced World War Two hoped would have been over for good, and includes nine reports on Vietnam, three on the Six Day War involving Israel's fight for sovereignty, and two on war in Central America.
I highly commend this book.
