The View from the Ground
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4.0 • 2 Ratings
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Publisher Description
An anthology spanning six decades of on-the-scene journalism from “one of the most eloquent witnesses of the twentieth century” (Bill Buford, Granta).
For nearly sixty years, Martha Gellhorn traveled the globe to report on the tumult and extremity of life in the twentieth century. The View from the Ground, as Gellhorn explains, “is a selection of articles written during six decades; peace-time reporting. That is to say, the countries in the background were at peace at the moment of writing; not that there was peace on earth.”
Included here are accounts of America during the Depression, Israel and Palestine in the 1950s, post-Franco Spain, protests at the White House, domestic life in Africa, and Gellhorn’s return to Cuba after a forty-one-year absence—among many other topics. Informed by the horrors of fascism in Spain and Germany, the modern terror in Central America, and by the courage of those who stand up to the thugs both in an out of government, The View from the Ground is a singular act of testimony that, like its companion volume, The Face of War, is “an eloquent, unforgettable history of a chaotic century” (San Francisco Chronicle).
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Six decades of modern history are condensed into this collection of essays by veteran novelist and journalist Gellhorn, who set out for Paris in 1930, aged 21, with a suitcase and $75, determined to become a foreign correspondent "within a few weeks.'' In the succeeding 58 years, she has been witness, for starters, to a lynching in Mississippi and to the fall of Czechoslovakia in the '30s, the plight of Italian war orphans in the '40s, the growth of Israel and the Palestinian ``problem'' in the '50s and '60s, post-Franco Spain in the '70s and the new Cuba in the '80s. Gellhorn has reported on the McCarthy hearings, the Eichmann trial, the Vietnam peace talks, and, more recently, the nuclear protests by the women of Greenham Common, England, and torture in El Salvador. She is a past master of personal journalism, a partisan of human rights who has always regarded writing as ``payment for the chance to look and learn.'' This anthology, a companion to Gellhorn's The Face of War (Paperbacks Forecasts Feb. 12), is a testament to the upheavals in ordinary lives during peacetime wrought by this century's unsavory, divisive politics; it is also a tribute to the few who, like Gellhorn herself, have stood for justice. Gellhorn's obscurity is singularly unwarranted; she is a wise woman and writer.
