Nobody Said Not to Go: The Life, Loves, and Adventures of Emily Hahn [Hardcover]

Ken Cuthbertson (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 1998

Known as 'Mickey' to her friends, Emily Hahn traveled across the country dressed as a boy in the 192Os; worked as a Harvey Girl in Taos, New Mexico; ran away to the Belgian Congo as a Red Cross worker during the Great Depression; was the concubine of a Chinese poet in Shanghai in the 1930s; became an opium addict; had an affair and an illegitimate child with the head of the British Secret Service in Hong Kong just before the outbreak of World War II; was involved in underground relief work in occupied Hong Kong; and moved back to the United States and became a pioneer in the fields of environmentalism and wildlife preservation before her death last year. Mickey Hahn also wrote hundreds of articles and short stories for "The New Yorker" from 1925 to 1995 and wrote 52 books in her lifetime, astonishing her publishers and agents by moving effortlessly from biography to humor to fiction to travel memoir to history.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

A globe-trotting New Yorker writer for 68 years?almost until her death last year at age 92?Emily Hahn notoriously chose the "uncertain path," and Cuthbertson does her adventures justice as long as the momentum holds. The first third presents the clearest picture of Hahn, without exotic trappings: Flouting convention early, Hahn graduated from the University of Wisconsin as a mining engineer, just to prove that a woman could. Through the 1920s she fledged as a writer and traveler, mingling with, but never quite joining, the smart set. Then in 1929, the New Yorker's editor and founder Harold Ross, took her on, saying, "You have a great talent.... You can be cattier than anyone I know." In 1930, she traveled alone to Penge, a remote backwater in the Congo, where her host, an American pal, turned into a kind of Mr. Kurtz, provided grist for a memoir, Congo Sale, and a novel, With Naked Foot. Hahn's exploits crested with her stay in Shanghai and Hong Kong from 1935 through 1943. Her life makes for heady cinematic stuff: her social gadding; affair with Chinese poet Sinmay Zau; opium addiction; child with and eventual marriage to Hong Kong's head of British intelligence, Charles Boxer (all set against the battle for Shanghai and the fall of Hong Kong). Unhappily, Cuthbertson begins to fall for his own melodrama ("Was that a glistening in his eyes, or was it a trick of the light?"), and the postwar pages become a tame resume of domestic arrangements and literary outpouring.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist

By all accounts, Emily Hahn (1905^-97) should be a household name. A trailblazer, she routinely defied convention and chronicled her singular experiences in hundreds of articles for the New Yorker and in more than 50 books. Cuthbertson, who met Hahn while working on his biography of John Gunther, speculates that she was just too controversial, versatile, and complicated for fame then, but not now. He adroitly brings her back into the limelight by detailing her achievements--she was the first woman at her university to earn a degree in mining engineering, she drove cross-country during the risky 1920s, then lived by her wits in colonial Africa and war-torn China, mining not the earth but her involvements with other cultures, men, and every conceivable form of entertainment, work, and danger. The events that Hahn witnessed were world-changing, and her blazing candor about war, race, sex, and feminism was courageous; but she was too hot to handle, and even though she wrote for the New Yorker well into her eighties, she dropped from sight. Thanks to Cuthbertson, Hahn has an encore in front of an audience hungry for just her kind of story. Donna Seaman

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 383 pages
• Publisher: Faber & Faber (May 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 057119950X
• ISBN-13: 978-0571199501
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6.1 x 1.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (10 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #857,293 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

12 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Life of Adventure, October 9, 2002

By 

D. A Wend (Arlington Heights, IL USA) - See all my reviews
(TOP 1000 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Nobody Said Not to Go: The Life, Loves, and Adventures of Emily Hahn (Paperback)

I knew nothing about Emily Hahn and I picked this book up being intrigued by a synopsis. It is a very well written book about an extraordinary life. Emily (Mickey) Hahn broke every convention of her time: a woman who studied mining engineering in collage, a lone white woman in Africa in the early 1930's, a single woman in China, an American "married" to a Chinese as his concubine and a journalist caught in the Japanese invasion of that country. Hopefully, I have said enough to tickle the interest of would-be readers since I don't want to give away any more.

This is a life story that reads like a novel. Why the Chinese portion of this book has not been made into a movie is a surprise to me. There is a cinematic quality of Ms. Hahn's life in China (which she wrote about herself) that cries out for filming. Ken Cuthbertson tells the story of this life without judgement calls does not clutter his book with useless facts. The book is illustrated with photographs spread throughout the chapters where they are needed. I could not recommend this book more highly.

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A really good read, July 24, 1998

By A Customer

This review is from: Nobody Said Not to Go: The Life, Loves, and Adventures of Emily Hahn (Hardcover)

I picked up a copy of this book because the cover looked so interesting. The cover matched the contents of the book. Emily Hahn was a writer for the New Yorker magazine, but she also wrote more than 50 books. When she was not writing, she was an adventurer, a traveler, an opium addict, and a whole lot of other things. Wow, what a life she led! Emily Hahn did the kind of wild things that most women of her day (she was born in 1905 and died in 1997) only dreamed of and that very few dared to write about. The author has done an excellent job of telling Hahn's story. I enjoyed Nobody Said Not to Go. It's a well written, quick paced story about an amazing woman.

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A rip-roaring bio with surprise turns, June 18, 1998

By A Customer

This review is from: Nobody Said Not to Go: The Life, Loves, and Adventures of Emily Hahn (Hardcover)

"A forgotten American literary treasure." That's what one of Emily Hahn's young admirers called her. Hahn's friend and one-time mentor once told her, "If you and I had been born male and had written what we've written, we'd be a lot better known."

Hahn, who wrote for the New Yorker magazine for an astounding 68 years, died in February 1997 at age 92. She left a rich literary legacy that includes 52 books and hundreds of articles, short stories, and poems. In the course of her lifetime, she was many things: a mining geologist, a horseback trail guide, a greeting card writer, a receptionist, a medical aide worker, a reporter, and a teacher, to name just a few of her many occupations.

Hahn lived with African pygmies. She was the concubine of a Chinese poet. She and a girlfriend disguisged themselves as men when they drove solo across the U.S. in 1924, before it was safe--or prudent--for any young woman to do so. Hahn had an affair with, and a child by, the married head of British intelligence in Hong Kong just prior to the 1941 Japanese attack on that British colony. She was an opium addict. She once tried to kill herself. She smoked cigars, enjoyed strong drink, and she knew everyone who was anyone in the glittery New York literary world during the period 1940-1990. Emily Hahn fervently believed a woman could do anything a man could do. And she did it long before the word "feminism" was even coined. Emily Hahn led an amazing, uninhibited, and totally fascinating life. In this, the first biography of Emily Hahn, Canadian journalist Ken Cuthbertson explores the life, loves, and adventures of the woman known to her friends simply as "Mickey." In the words of an Entertainment Weekly reviewer (June 19, 1998), this is "a rip-roaring bio with surprise turns."