No Hurry to Get Home: The Memoir of the New Yorker Writer Whose Unconventional Life and Adventures Spanned the 20th Century [Paperback]

Emily Hahn (Author), Ken Cuthbertson (Author), Sheila McGrath (Author)

Book Description

Series: Adventura Books | Publication Date: November 2000

Emily Hahn was a woman ahead of her time, graced with a sense of adventure and a gift for living. Born in St. Louis in 1905, she crashed the all-male precincts of the University of Wisconsin geology department as an undergraduate, traveled alone to the Belgian Congo at age 25, was the concubine of a Chinese poet in Shanghai, bore the child of the head of the British Secret Service before World War II, and finally returned to New York to live and write in Greenwich Village. In this memoir, first published as essays in The New Yorker, Hahn writes vividly and amusingly about the people and places she came to know and love -- with an eye for the curious and a heart for the exotic.

Product Details

• Paperback: 312 pages
• Publisher: Seal Press; 1 edition (November 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 158005045X
• ISBN-13: 978-1580050456
• Product Dimensions: 8.2 x 5.5 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,220,898 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

17 of 18 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars An anthology of travel pieces, March 10, 2001

By 

Eileen Galen (USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: No Hurry to Get Home: The Memoir of the New Yorker Writer Whose Unconventional Life and Adventures Spanned the 20th Century (Paperback)

In his lively and evocative Introduction to this book, Hahn biographer Ken Cuthbertson says that Emily Hahn "moved from here to there to everywhere, like some sort of multi-colored and quixotic literary butterfly" for around forty-seven years. Sheila McGrath, in her Foreword, looks through a different lens, seeing "an inborn and unyielding independence that must have been difficult to maintain," a wholly original woman who traveled, had adventures, made friends, and wrote about all of it with an unflagging energy and dedication. She lived exactly as she chose to, for her entire long life.

This book is a collection of essays that Hahn herself assembled in 1970, in order to fulfill a commitment she'd made to a publisher to produce an autobiography, which she was loathe to write, according to Cuthbertson. There are several delightful pieces on Hahn's good childhood and school days in the American midwest, and then the rest bright and incredible travel pieces - letters home, really - that appeared in The New Yorker magazine, from 1937 to 1970. (One describes a cross-country trip she and a friend made one summer during the '20's, as undergraduates, in a Model T). Artful and sensitive ordering of these pieces supplies the reader with a chronology. Unfortunately, the pieces are undated, so you must guess as to date of writing, and date of publication.

Hahn's adventures and quirky and strong views are fabulous and charming - and quaint at times. From "The Big Smoke": "Though I had always wanted to be an opium addict, I can't claim that as a reason I went to China." She supplies a witty and thorough description of how she did it. (And later, of how she kicked the habit.) In other venues she had a pet gibbon named Mr. Mills, she lived in the jungle for a while, and was literally trapped in Shanghai for a spell. Amazing things, reported in a calm - but playful - voice. The people she met and got to know are drawn less fully than her escapades. You, in turn, never really get to know them, either.

Hahn does not go deep so much as range far and wide. She has a great ear, an even better eye, and is fearless. That she reported so dryly and well on her doings in the US, the Congo, China, Japan, England and Europe is the icing on the cake. A very good and atmospheric read.

11 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars No Hurry to Get Home, December 11, 2000

By 

Seal Press (Seattle, WA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: No Hurry to Get Home: The Memoir of the New Yorker Writer Whose Unconventional Life and Adventures Spanned the 20th Century (Paperback)

'Emily Hahn was an original--a first-generation feminist who chose not to be called one, a woman of courage who constantly underplayed it, a reporter of the acts of men and animals, whose peculiar likeness she grasped perhaps better than any other writer of her time. Above all, she was a prose stylist, a plain writer whose simplicities are never simple, and whose every sentence ends with a sharp, clean bite. Her (beautifully) episodic memoirs can stand alongside those of M. F. K. Fisher, who she in so many ways resembled, as a model of clarity, precision, calm sensuality, carefully weighed sadness.' --Adam Gopnik, New Yorker writer

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars An Amazing Life, October 18, 2003

By 

"skinnymcguinny" (Berkeley, CA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: No Hurry to Get Home: The Memoir of the New Yorker Writer Whose Unconventional Life and Adventures Spanned the 20th Century (Paperback)

Hahn tells of an exotic existence in a practical and clear voice rich with her honest observations of the people and places of Chicago, London, the Belgian Congo, and Shanghai. Not a memoir in the traditional sense, Hahn, with forthright economy, simply allows the articles she's written throughout her lifetime to illustrate tales of her travels. An inspiring read for woman and men who long for an adventurous life!