INSIDE AFRICA.

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I was ravenously interested in human beings,” he said. “I never really got a big scoop in my life, and the little ones got were just plain accidents.I wasn't one of those reporters who managed to be on the scene when things happened. I was generally somewhere else. Matter of fact, I never really gave a damn about spot news. The idea of beating The Asso ciated Press by six minutes bored me silly.” John J. Gunther, About the Author, Biography at Harper Collins Publishers, Accessed 22 October 2012. Mr. Gunther's admirers were grateful for his grasp of sheer scope, the enthusiasm apparent in his reporting and his gift for popularizing remote places by describing them bluntly and with feeling. By noting a seem ingly small detail, he could bring a place, a people, into sharp focus for his readers.

Anthropologists are at a loss to explain the Watusi's tallness. One possible explanation is that they are offspring of the giants who fled before Joshua's legions and escaped to Africa (see Jericho's Giants), but, after many centuries of interbreeding with the aborigines, have been greatly reduced in bulk and might. "They do not look strong," adds Gunther, "and give the impression of being much inbred. They have small heads for their height, slim wrists, and delicate long thin arms." 8 Gunther was born in 1901 in the Lakeview district of Chicago and grew up on the North Side of the city. He was the first child of a German-American family: his father was Eugene Guenther, a traveling salesman; his mother Lizette Schoeninger Guenther. [1] Of course even by this point there were independent countries on the continent. You will get to feel the presence of men like Nasser and Haile Selassie, fully knowing that they're at the head of a new age.

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In reply to his asking a group of Philadelphians “what, if anything, descendants of Benjamin Franklin might be doing in Philadelphia these days,” “one answer was (I report it literally): ‘We consider Mr. Franklin to have been of a somewhat shady family.’” Frances’s afterword was the most personal and unabashedly emotional of the three parts. She wrote about her relationship with her son, her attempt to “create of him a newer kind of human being: an aware person, without fear, and with love.” To remake a war-ravaged world required people who cared about others, and Frances had started with her son. She’d reared him to become a cooperative rather than competitive person. But now that he was dead, she was consumed by guilt. She felt remorse about sending Johnny to boarding school; she regretted the divorce: “I wished we had loved Johnny more when he was alive.” Spain - (Spanish Morocco, Spanish Sahara (Western Sahara), Spanish Guinea (Equatorial Guinea).) Spanish Morocco is the only of the three which gets more than a few sentences. Spanish Morocco is heavily militarised, and doesn't really get a short summary from Gunther.

Gunther’s unpublishable book was a memoir: an account of the death, in 1947, of his 17-year-old son, Johnny, from a brain tumor. Gunther had started writing while the experience of Johnny’s illness was still raw, finishing the book in a few weeks, six months after his son’s death. He’d set out with the idea of a privately circulated memoir, the sort of volume of remembrances printed in a few hundred copies that parents of soldiers killed in action sent to friends and relations. But as he finished the manuscript, he began to think it should be published for a wider audience. Peirce, Neal R. (1973). The Great Plains States of America: People, Politics, and Power in the Nine Great Plains States. W. W. Norton & Company. pp.11–13. ISBN 9780393053494.Cuthbertso, Ken (October 2002). Inside: The Biography of John Gunther. Open Road Integrated Media, Incorporated. p.11. ISBN 9780759232884. To the task of writing “In side Europe,” “Inside Russia,” “Inside Africa” and all the oth er “Inside” books that brought him considerable fame and re spectable fortune, John Gunther brought a breathless curiosity, sharp ears and eyes for the offbeat fact, a consuming vital ity, a gregarious charm and a crusader's zeal to tell his read ers what he thought they might not know about other people and other places. Atlanta is supposed to rank fairly high among Southern cities in its attitude toward Negroes, but it out-ghettoes anything I saw in a European ghetto, even in Warsaw. What I looked at was caste and untouchability — half the time I blinked remembering that this was not India.” He does, though, see signs that in some respects segregation is beginning to break down. “I saw Negroes and whites standing together in lines at post office windows and at Western Union counters, and while I was in Atlanta, The Journal , for the first time in its history, gave a Negro woman the title of ‘Miss.’” Born Aug. 30, 1901, on Chi cago's North Side, John Joseph Gunther was the son of Eugene M. Gunther and the former Li sette Shoeninger. His mother was a schoolteacher and his fa ther “dabbled in real estate and excelled at drinking,” Mr. Gun ther said. He had one sister, Jean.

The book inspired and gave its name to a 1948 Broadway musical revue, Inside U.S.A., that was very loosely based on the book. [19] In recounting his travels, Marco Polo tells of running into a gigantic people in Zanzibar. Concerning them, he wrote:An external event that did slow the process of writing the book was the fatal illness of Gunther's teenage son Johnny. In April 1946, Johnny was found to have a malignant brain tumor. Gunther managed to continue writing through his son's illness, which he was later to chronicle in the book Death Be Not Proud. [11] Gunther’s teenage readers recognized Death Be Not Proud ’s redemptive message. It was a book about an individual whose selflessness was his most salient feature. As an eighth-grade boy in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, put it, “His fight for life was not only for his mortal body but the lives of millions of people.” But Johnny’s wasn’t the self-sacrifice of a Christ figure or the hardened courage of a soldier. It was something altogether more recognizable to young readers. Students put themselves in the shoes of Johnny, Frances, or John. Teachers encouraged that sympathetic identification by asking their pupils to write essays from the perspective of one of the “characters” in the book. a b "Guide to the John Gunther Papers 1935–1967". University of Chicago Library. 2006 . Retrieved April 18, 2013. The 1930's were the bub bling, blazing days of Ameri can foreign correspondents in Europe,” Mr. Gunther said. “This was before journalism became institutionalized. We correspondents were strictly on our own. We avoided offi cial handouts. We were scav engers, buzzards, out to get the news, no matter whose wings got clipped.”

One of the things that makes it so alive is Gunther’s curiosity about his own country; he knew Latin America, he knew Europe, he knew Asia, but he didn’t know America. “The United States, like a cobra, lay before me, seductive, terrifying and immense,” he wrote. “‘Inside U.S.A.’ was the hardest task I ever undertook.” He was yet again an outsider, looking in. “Not only was I trying to write for the man from Mars; I was one.” Gunther has written a load of books, including a number of the Inside... series, Inside Africa appears to be the largest, as one might expect when it comes to summarising this continent of variation. From the Sahara in the north, the rainforests of the Congo Basin in Central Africa, the Ethiopian highlands and other mountain ranges, the various rivers and lakes and the savanna of east and southern Africa. And that is just the geography. Ethiopia is next on the list, where Haile Selassie is described with the least respect I have seen - referred to as dainty and 'exceptionally short'; although the author was granted an audience. He does a reasonable job of describing the emperor's rule over the recent period. Eritrea and the Somalia's (French, British and actual) get a brief description, focussed mostly on the 'secret' American military base in Eritrea (comms & weather).

The whole country has a fix ation on shoes. Moscow is the only city where, if Marilyn Monroe should walk down the street with nothing on but shoes, people would stare at her feet first. Clothes have no shape; but then neither have most Russian women. Men are short and squat, built like square corks. Moscow would look 100 per cent better if every citizen lost 30 pounds.” In our time, when the intimate memoir has become commonplace, Harper & Brothers’ queasy reaction to Gunther’s project is a reminder of an era when stringent rules of reticence still reigned. The public’s unexpected embrace of the book is disorienting too. The usual assumption is that the modern, unguarded memoir’s origins lie in the narcissism of the 1990s, or the self-revelatory zeal of the ’70s. But Gunther’s surprise hit points to a different genesis: the anti-fascism of the ’30s and widespread revulsion at the dehumanizing horrors of World War II. The predominance of the genre today—which we think about as a celebration of “I”—had its beginnings in an attempt to heal the collective “we.” Gunther intended to write a companion book, to be titled Inside Washington, focused on the nation-scale problems, personalities, and institutions of the U.S. He never completed the second book, because of the amount that would be required and because he could not decide how best to coordinate the publication timing with the quadrennial cycle of presidential elections. A revised edition of Inside U.S.A. was released in 1951. [5] He later continued his "Inside" series with three more books: Inside Africa in 1955, Inside Russia Today in 1958, and Inside Europe Today in 1961. [2] A 50th anniversary edition of Inside U.S.A. was published in 1997 ( ISBN 978-1-56584-358-5). [20] Gunther begins his discovery of America in California — “the most spectacular and most diversified American state, California so ripe, golden, yeasty, churning in flux. … at once demented and very sane, adolescent and mature” — and he proceeds around the country, state by state, until he arrives in Arizona, next door to where he began. Sometimes he devotes an entire chapter to a single person — the perpetual presidential candidate-to-be Harold Stassen; the great industrialist Henry Kaiser; New York’s colorful (to say the least) Mayor Fiorello La Guardia, who is probably best remembered for having, during a strike of newspaper deliverers, read “the funnies” aloud on the radio so as not to disappoint the city’s kids.