PATRON PICKS--Ahead of Time

Kassie's pick--Ahead of Time:  My Early Years as a Foreign Correspondent, by Ruth Gruber


Synopsis:
Long before feminism became a potent force in our time, Ruth Gruber was already blazing a trail for later generations of women. Now in paperback for the first time, this captivating memoir covers the first twenty-five years of an inspiring life, including these historic moments: Gruber's unprecedented academic career, which reached its zenith in 1932, when at twenty she became the world's youngest Ph.D. as a visiting American student at Cologne University, her return to Nazi Germany in 1935, and the rallies she attended where Hitler inveighed against "international Jews" like her; and her first stint as a foreign correspondent, when she became the only journalist to report from the Soviet Arctic, traveled in open cockpit seaplanes, met utopians who extolled Stalin's system, and gulag inmates who told her the bitter truth about his terrible schemes. Gruber writes with warmth, compassion, and humor, offering a life story that will be long remembered by all history lovers, adventurers, and women and men of all ages.

Kassie says:  Incandescent woman, still radiant in her 90's.  Pioneering journalist and photographer who stared the realities of Hitler's Europe in the face.  Still joyful after all these years.