World prehistory Book

I had some difficulty with this book in which Martha Gelhorn describes some horror journeys she took between the 1940s and the 1970s. On the one hand, 'feisty female setting off on adventures around the globe, unintimidated by lovers or strangers' is bound to appeal to me. Gelhorn's frank, no-nonsense tone is amusing, too, and I like the sense that there's no sentimentality about her. I do not travel for pleasure, myself. I have lived and worked in different countries, but that is a matter of pulling up my life by its roots and transplanting it to a different climate, in hopes that it will 'take'. It is a different experience for those like Gelhorn, who go out into the world, to see what is there. I admire their boldness and sense of adventure.

But about halfway through I found myself struggling with what read like racism. In the first three sections of the book, she observes the Chinese, northern-Caribbean folk and Africans, and her contempt and disparagement and sense of innate superiority are deeply distasteful. In an early comment, I wrote, "Some of the attitudes to people of other races are hard to take. I'm trying to consider this is 1940s, and from a particular perspective, but it still grates." Some of her attitude can be explained by the fact that the people she observes (not interacts with, there's very little mutual intercourse) are usually speaking a different language, poor and dirty by Western standards. But her comments repeatedly seem to underline their darkness, their non-white-ness, their otherness.

This became so disturbing that I put down the book for a while and let my subconscious work on it. And it occurred to me that it was 'otherness' that was bothering her. Wherever she went, she felt a great gulf between herself and the inhabitants of the country she was visiting. Language, class, religion and culture created such barriers that she looked uncomprehending at the people around her. She found little or no common ground. As the visits progressed, this incomprehension would harden into animosity, until everything she saw was ugly. I think she became pretty ugly, herself.

A later comment of mine: "And the racism- it's not really that. Rather she sees people as 'types', always as representative of groups; always 'other'. Usually there's antipathy/incomprehension." She used that word 'types', several times in categorising the white colonials she encountered on her trips, and who were also incomprehensible, sometimes beneath contempt.

By the time I returned to the book, and the final essay, about her 197-something trip to Moscow, Gelhorn had lost her appeal for me. But I found that she'd also lost that personal animosity. Oh, it was another horror journey, and she hardly felt warm and cuddly towards the Soviet people, but her animosity was mainly for their repressive government, and it felt less jarring. (Or is that my racism?)

I don't get the sense that Gelhorn learned much on these trips; not about herself, and not about the individuals she met, nor the societies she observed. And I feel somewhat cheated by her book, because I haven't learned much either.

Difficult to rate this- maybe 2 and a half stars?