Nobody said not to go : the life, loves, and adventures of Emily Hahn /

Emily Hahn (1905-97)--described by Cuthbertson as a journalist, traveler and travel writer, reporter, correspondent, feminist, opium addict, and concubine--was educated and trained as a geological engineer. Her voluminous authorial output over her 68-year career includes more than 50 books, ranging from novels and biographies, through children's books and travel literature, to popular biology. She was also connected with The New Yorker for a concurrent career spanning seven decades, during which she published 181 articles with that magazine. As his subtitle demonstrates, Cuthbertson depicts Hahn's life as controversial and extraordinary. Though not in "the movement," Hahn is considered an early feminist, "a determined woman who refused to let her sex or society's conventions block her aspirations." Thus, even though she cannot accurately be described as a major writer, she certainly was a prolific and controversial one; her life should profitably bear scrutiny in a variety of disciplines, including women's studies, journalism, communication, and science, as well as literature. Recommended for all readership levels and a variety of library collections. A. R. Nourie; Illinois State University

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

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 résumé of domestic arrangements and literary outpouring. (May) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

In this extensively researched biography, historian and journalist Cuthbertson (Inside: The Biography of John Gunther, 1992) brings to life the inspired individualism of one of this century's least recognized and most interesting journalists, Emily Hahn. When Hahn died at the age of 92 in 1997, a chapter in literary journalism closed. She had been a staff writer at the New Yorker through all four of its editorial reigns, producing 181 articles, in addition to 52 books, stories, and poems. She came of age in the '20s in St. Louis and blazed a trail of gutsy independence and drive through New York and onward. Hahn lived the concerns of our age with an intensity that brightened her work and brought her success. Yet it would be wrong to call her a feminist, though feminists owe a great deal to characters like her. Cuthbertson fails to address this distinction, an important one for Hahn. Her life was defined as much by profession as by passion. Ever the ``roving heroine'' (as described by Roger Angell), she built her literary career upon impressions of a world in flux. Her swath of discovery stretched across Africa (during the Depression), India, and China, where she broke with Western morality and became a concubine and opium partner to the Chinese intellectual/publisher Sinmay Zau just before the outbreak of WWII. A lasting love affair with the head of the British Secret Service began in Hong Kong during that city's occupation, a fascinating period which led to some of her most important work. Hahn once wrote that ``she wanted desperately to be noticed, and equally desperately to be let alone.'' Her exhibitionism found perfect expression in her life's work. Hahn's life-at-large was an exhilarating trip across an era. Some of the later research drags on, but Cuthbertson's contagious commitment to the significance of this life almost justifies every word. Social history at its best. (b&w photos)