The View from the Ground: Peacetime Dispatches,1936-87
By (Author) Martha Gellhorn
Eland Publishing Ltd
Eland Publishing Ltd
1st October 2016
13th July 2016
United Kingdom
General
Non Fiction
Reportage, journalism or collected columns
909.82
Paperback
352
Width 146mm, Height 221mm
370g
If you want to know about writing, about how to make others share the horror and intensity of an experience, try the first piece in this collection, Justice at Night. Martha Gellhorn wrote it as a 28-year-old, having just returned home to the States after four years in Europe, in 1936. What follows is a selection of fifty years of peacetime journalism, history caught at the moment of its unfolding, as it looked and felt to those who experienced it. It's about revolutions in the making, guilty acts of state terrorism, poverty, injustice and recovery. It vividly captures the range and intensity of Gellhorn's courageous work and is also a passionate call to arms, not only to remember the wronged and to bear witness to evil, but to stand your ground in the face of it.
Martha Gellhorn (1908-98) published five novels, fourteen novellas and two collections of short stories. She wanted to be remembered primarily as a novelist, yet to most people she is remembered as an outstanding war correspondent and for something which infuriated her, her brief marriage to Ernest Hemingway during the Second World War. She covered almost every major conflict from the Spanish Civil War to the American invasion of Panama in 1989. For a woman it was groundbreaking work, and she took it on with an absolute commitment to the truth. She was one of the great political witnesses of the twentieth century.