Starry and Restless
Three Women Who Changed Work, Writing, and the World
-
- ¥2,000
発行者による作品情報
“Read this book and be enthralled.” —The New York Times
A Parade Most Anticipated Book of the Year
The page-turning story of three women reporters and the way they changed the world, work, and journalism.
She hid on a Red Cross boat to reach Omaha Beach on D-Day. She walked the abandoned streets of Hong Kong to take food to her daughter’s father, a prisoner of war. She fought off the advances of overzealous Yugoslavian diplomats, found overlooked details of world history in a dentist’s kitchen in Sarajevo. She traveled alone to Mexico. She traveled alone to Congo. She traveled alone to the American South. She married Hemingway. She married a Chinese poet-playboy-publisher, then married a British war hero. She fell in love with H. G. Wells. She gave birth and raised a child on her own. She landed on the front page of the newspaper. She wrote for the great magazines of her time—Vogue, The New Yorker, Harper’s Bazaar. She wrote a play. She wrote a memoir. She wrote a genre-breaking travel narrative. She wrote bestsellers. She wrote and wrote and wrote. She changed the very way we think about writing and the way journalists craft stories—which sources are viable, which details are important—and the way women move and work in the world.
She was Martha Gellhorn. She was Emily “Mickey” Hahn. She was Rebecca West. Each woman was starry-eyed for success, for adventure, and helped ensure that other starry and restless women could make unforgettable lives for themselves. They fought for their lives and their work. They were praised and criticized for it all.
In language as lively and nimble, in passages as intimate and adventurous, and with conviction as fierce and indefatigable as her subjects’ own, Julia Cooke’s Starry and Restless plays out the stories of three women across three decades and five continents. Martha, Mickey, Rebecca—journalists, authors, mothers, lovers, friends. These women didn’t just bear witness to the great changes of the twentieth century; their curiosity, grit, ambition, and stories changed the world.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this expansive group biography, journalist Cooke (Come Fly the World) profiles three prolific mid-century female journalists and examines the impact their reporting had on both their times and their profession. Rebecca West, Emily "Mickey" Hahn, and Martha Gellhorn wrote about everything from the glitter of Shanghai to the horrors of Dachau; along the way, they were themselves the subjects of many a scandalous story regarding their affairs and divorces. It was an era when women reporters were frequently challenged as not up to the task, but it was also a time when writers were expanding "what a reporter could do in print," and all three relished this new freedom, crafting voice-driven work that often centered their own travels and travails. Each woman was stunningly independent while also being a mother and occasionally a wife, resulting in complex feelings about domestic life (Hahn told her daughters not to learn how to keep house so it couldn't be used against them; Gellhorn was obsessed with making her homes into "nests"). The ways in which, for these women, "family life and writing and roaming... braid together" ended up opening new possibilities for what it means to live a writer's life for both men and women, Cooke astutely observes. It's a fascinating study of how three legendary reporters left their mark.
