For my second nomination, I will go with a memoir that's been on my TBR for awhile because the author seems an amazing woman who lived through some of the most important events of the 20th century and came in contact with many famous people. She learned storytelling from Virginia Woolf and wrote a biography/doctoral dissertation/critique about her. I nominate
Ahead of Time: My Early Years as a Foreign Correspondent by Ruth Gruber.
From Goodreads:
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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.
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