The View from the Ground

Six decades of modern history are condensed into this collection of essays by veteran novelist and journalist Gellhorn, who set out for Paris in 1930, aged 21, with a suitcase and $75, determined to become a foreign correspondent ""within a few weeks.'' In the succeeding 58 years, she has been witness, for starters, to a lynching in Mississippi and to the fall of Czechoslovakia in the '30s, the plight of Italian war orphans in the '40s, the growth of Israel and the Palestinian ``problem'' in the '50s and '60s, post-Franco Spain in the '70s and the new Cuba in the '80s. Gellhorn has reported on the McCarthy hearings, the Eichmann trial, the Vietnam peace talks, and, more recently, the nuclear protests by the women of Greenham Common, England, and torture in El Salvador. She is a past master of personal journalism, a partisan of human rights who has always regarded writing as ``payment for the chance to look and learn.'' This anthology, a companion to Gellhorn's The Face of War (Paperbacks Forecasts Feb. 12), is a testament to the upheavals in ordinary lives during peacetime wrought by this century's unsavory, divisive politics; it is also a tribute to the few who, like Gellhorn herself, have stood for justice. Gellhorn's obscurity is singularly unwarranted; she is a wise woman and writer. (March)