Customer Reviews

Travels with Myself and Another

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This wonderful travelogue of "bad trips" to politically important places takes the reader on an incredible range of journeys to many world hot and "cold" war spots. China and a meeting with Communist leaders in hiding during WWII (with the writer's then husband (Ernest Hemingway) looming large but quietly in the background and a poignant trip to an aging Russian writer in the days of Soviet rule transport us through time and space. Martha Gellhorn, as journalist and fiction writer, needs to be "recovered" with the very best of war correspondents of any gender and the adventuresome and unbelievably courageous woman travelers of the 20th century. The section on Gellhorn's travels in Africa, because it is so "honest" and forthright on matters of race, will strike some as politically incorrect, but her descriptions of modes of transport, race, missionaries and the search for exotic animals are among the most vivid anywhere. This book moves the reader -- through time and space, brain and heart.

One of the finest books I have read on the subject of travel, in a class with the best of Theroux and Chatwin. Take on your next trip along with a battered straw hat..!

As a traveller and a reader, this is one of the best books i have read in a very long time.

"Nothing is better for self-esteem than survival." So Martha Gellhorn introduces her travel memoir of her most memorable horror journeys in an entertaining and historical book, Travels with Myself and Another.

I found this book a few years ago while browsing at Barnes and Noble. I rarely buy books, but the brief description of Gellhorn as the third wife of Ernest Hemingway and rare female journalist during WWII was enough for me to add it to my exclusive biography collection. Gellhorn witnessed the invasion of Normandy as a stowaway after getting kicked off the press boat and wrote over a dozen fiction and non-fiction books in her 60-year career. Travels with Myself and Another is a collection of "the best of the worst journeys," originally published in 1978 and spanning a swath of history from the WWII Greatest Generation to the 1970's counterculture revolution.

"We are supposed to learn by experience;" Gellhorn reflects on her repeated travels in her introduction, "fat lot of good that does if you only remember the experience too late." We start out in WWII China with Ernest Hemingway as her unwilling "another," and end with her babysitting her helpless driver in East Africa. Her laugh-out-loud descriptions of lunches with everyone from Chiang Kai-shek and Madame Chiang in war-torn China to Mrs. Mandelstam in the oppressive Soviet communist regime provide an entertaining romp through history with someone who has been there. Her casual mentions of the countries in Africa and realistic dialect of the natives of the Caribbean made me pick up an atlas. Her character as a true free spirit who hires her own boats against the advice of locals shines through in her tight and un-politically correct prose. "I remember West Africa the way one remembers pain, as an incident but never the precise sensations." (Sixty-eight pages through West Africa are lifted straight from a found journal and were as hard for me to get through as it was for Gellhorn to get through West Africa. I recommend skipping this part if you also find it doesn't flow well.) But the rest of the book is a treasure of insight, history, and world travel.

Travels with Myself and Another was one of the first books that brought home to me that real life can be just as entertaining to read as fiction. I found myself studying Gellhorn's quick and direct writing style, impressed by the amount of description she is able to capture in just a few words. I loved reading her stories that contained the honest appraisals of her thoughts and impressions. I often picked up her book, saying to myself, "Take me away, Martha." Travels with Myself and Another opened my eyes to the depth of knowledge in women's lives and stories.

by Karen Ballinger
for Story Circle Book Reviews
reviewing books by, for, and about women

This is a truly delightful read...Gellhorn's wit and courage shine through. Her observations and insight are so interesting. You will enjoy this book.

It's as if you are riding beside Gelhorn on the same bumpy road in a broken down car full of dust, with the same crazy driver, clutching the seat and nashing your teeth a bit as she whispers in your ear all her astute and quite biased impressions better than you could ever dream up syourself.
Loads of fun and it will keep you from complaining ever again on a trip, which gawd only knows would be a God send!

Terrific. I traveled in Africa and Russia during this same period of time and this is what I would have written if I had the ability to do so. She speaks with great honesty and clarity.

Martha Gellhorn's adventures take you on a reality trip. She doesn't gloss it over but has such dry humor and wit. She learns enduring flexblity to hang in there and she teaches you what the journey entails. I liked her!
GOOD READ.

This is a book of Gellhorns recollections of trips thru China, Africa and Africa.
Her writing is such,... so lacking in substance that you feel she is making it up. It doesn't feel genuine. PLUS! and here's the real killer... SHE DOESN'T REMEMBER!. All through the book she states how she doesn't remember this or that, so often that the whole book comes onto question. The trip to China with her then husband Ernest Hemingway was a total blow out. She wasn't sure about anything.
The second story, her first trip to Africa, was the best in the bunch.
The last trip to Africa was totally unbelievable. Fiction.

She can not remember enough to make a coherent record of her journeys.

Also for someone who loves to travel and has spent her life doing so all around the world-- she has no camera! No interest in them. No pictures.

I've also read 'The View from the Ground' and wasn't impressed.