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Rating: 
Summary: No Hurry to Get Home
Review: '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
Rating: 
Summary: An Amazing Life
Review: 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!
Rating:
Summary: An anthology of travel pieces
Review: 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.
Rating:
Summary: An anthology of travel pieces
Review: 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.
Rating: 
Summary: She telephoned it in! False advertising!
Review: While approximately 30% of this book is taken up with interesting stories about life abroad in the early part of the 20th century, in no way, shape, or form is this book actually a memoir. It is a collection of her old New Yorker articles, most of which do not even deal with her life abroad. In fact, the majority of the chapters comprise uninteresting tales of her domestic life -- not quite what the title implies, either. The foreward states, in a fit of honesty that apparently didn't make it to either the title or back-cover copy, that Hahn was under contract to write a memoir, and instead, since she had already been paid and didn't much feel like writing anything more, took a bunch of her old New Yorker clippings and sent them in to her publisher. Anyhow, it certainly shows. I had heard of Hahn before, and was interested in reading about her China exploits in particular. One could understand, then, that I would be quite chagrined to find that fully the first half of the book is taken up with boring childhood reminiscences of St. Louis and Chicago, and that the last few stories are set once Hahn has become safely re-domiciled in NYC, and concern similarly banal domestic issues. This is not to say that there is no merit whatsoever in the book. At least a few of the stories are good and interesting: one or two about her life in the Congo, one about the Japanese occupation of Hong Kong, another two about Shanghai and her opium addiction. But even, with these, her writing style is usually so insubstantial, so affectedly flaky, like Dorothy Parker after a partial lobotomy or a teenaged girl dumbing it down so the boys like her, that I would in all likelihood not have liked this book had it been what its title and packaging claimed it to be. This book is mostly just a collection of irrelevant, poorly written prose that was slapped together to pay the bills. The publisher should have demanded his money back.
Rating:
Summary: She telephoned it in! False advertising!
Review: While approximately 30% of this book is taken up with interesting stories about life abroad in the early part of the 20th century, in no way, shape, or form is this book actually a memoir. It is a collection of her old New Yorker articles, most of which do not even deal with her life abroad. In fact, the majority of the chapters comprise uninteresting tales of her domestic life -- not quite what the title implies, either. The foreward states, in a fit of honesty that apparently didn't make it to either the title or back-cover copy, that Hahn was under contract to write a memoir, and instead, since she had already been paid and didn't much feel like writing anything more, took a bunch of her old New Yorker clippings and sent them in to her publisher. Anyhow, it certainly shows. I had heard of Hahn before, and was interested in reading about her China exploits in particular. One could understand, then, that I would be quite chagrined to find that fully the first half of the book is taken up with boring childhood reminiscences of St. Louis and Chicago, and that the last few stories are set once Hahn has become safely re-domiciled in NYC, and concern similarly banal domestic issues. This is not to say that there is no merit whatsoever in the book. At least a few of the stories are good and interesting: one or two about her life in the Congo, one about the Japanese occupation of Hong Kong, another two about Shanghai and her opium addiction. But even, with these, her writing style is usually so insubstantial, so affectedly flaky, like Dorothy Parker after a partial lobotomy or a teenaged girl dumbing it down so the boys like her, that I would in all likelihood not have liked this book had it been what its title and packaging claimed it to be. This book is mostly just a collection of irrelevant, poorly written prose that was slapped together to pay the bills. The publisher should have demanded his money back.
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