Overview

The rediscovered memoir of an American gossip columnist turned “amazingly brilliant reporter” (The New York Times Book Review) as she reports from the frontlines of the Spanish Civil War and World War II “A long-overlooked classic that could not be timelier or more engrossing.”—Paula McLain, author of The Paris Wife Foreword by Christina Lamb, Sunday Times chief foreign correspondent and co-author of I Am Malala   Virginia Cowles was just twenty-seven years old when she decided to transform herself from a society columnist into a foreign press correspondent. Looking for Trouble is the story of this evolution, as Cowles reports from both sides of the Spanish Civil War, London on the first day of the Blitz, Nazi-run Munich, and Finland’s bitter, bloody resistance to the Russian invasion. Along the way, Cowles also meets Adolf Hitler (“an inconspicuous little man”), Benito Mussolini, Winston Churchill, Martha Gellhorn, and Ernest Hemingway. Her reportage blends sharp political analysis with a gossip columnist’s chatty approachability and a novelist’s empathy.   Cowles understood in 1937—long before even the average politician—that Fascism in Europe was a threat to democracy everywhere. Her insights on extremism are as piercing and relevant today as they were eighty years ago.

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9780593447604

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Reviews

[Virginia] Cowles was not only a doggedly ambitious reporter but one whose glamour facilitated unique access to her subjects. . . . Looking for Trouble is a rollicking thriller of a memoir. -The Wall Street Journal In all its diverse richness of drama and compassion and penetration and wit [Looking for Trouble] shows us the relentless progress of tragically integrated events, in a world where democratic civilization itself was fatally 'looking for trouble' by trying with all its might to look the other way. -The New York Times Book Review One of the truly great war correspondents of all time. -Antony Beevor, New York Times bestselling author of Stalingrad and Berlin

Author Information

Virginia Cowles, OBE, was born in Vermont in 1910. She gravitated to journalism in her youth, beginning as a society reporter for Harper’s Bazaar before pitching the idea of a travel column to Hearst Magazines, which she successfully transformed into a foreign press correspondent role when she began covering the Spanish Civil War in 1937. She later reported from North Africa as the special assistant to the American ambassador. Cowles died in France in 1983.

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