Travels with Myself and Another

A Memoir

By: Martha Gellhorn

Narrated by: Rebecca Lowman, Harry Nangle

Length: 13 hrs and 19 mins

Publisher's summary

Including a foreword by Bill Buford, Travels With Myself and Another rediscovers the voice of an extraordinary woman. 

"Martha Gellhorn was so fearless in a male way, and yet utterly capable of making men melt," writes New Yorker literary editor Bill Buford. As a journalist, Gellhorn covered every military conflict from the Spanish Civil War to Vietnam and Nicaragua. She also bewitched Eleanor Roosevelt's secret love and enraptured Ernest Hemingway with her courage as they dodged shell fire together.  

Hemingway is, of course, the unnamed "other" in the title of this tart memoir, first published in 1979, in which Gellhorn describes her globe-spanning adventures, both accompanied and alone. With razor-sharp humor and exceptional insight into place and character, she tells of a tense week spent among dissidents in Moscow; long days whiled away in a disused water tank with hippies clustered at Eilat on the Red Sea; and her journeys by sampan and horse to the interior of China during the Sino-Japanese War.

©2001 Martha Gellhorn (P)2018 Penguin Audio

Critic reviews

"Travels With Myself and Another is [Martha Gellhorn's] most intimate book and not well-enough known. As Bill Buford wrote in his foreword to a 2001 reissue of it, in the complexity of her observations 'she prefigures the works of people like Bruce Chatwin and Paul Theroux and Jonathan Raban and the renaissance of first-person adventure writing.'" (Dwight Garner, The New York Times)

"Whenever I meet someone who has not yet discovered this book, I attempt to describe why it's so marvellous...delicious reading." (Stephanie Nolan, The Globe and Mail) 

Annoying but actually very honest

This is a linked series of essays not about happy and pleasant voyages but about what Gellhorn terms "horror voyages." And they are. From bad hotels and poor food to war zones when you are lucky to get out alive. She is often not an engaging travel companion, whining and complaining and looking down her nose at the locals. And I agree with the review that deems her racist, especially when she wandering around Africa just prior to independence in Uganda, for example.

And yet, she has nerve, traveling alone or with what many would consider unsuitable travel companions, for example sailing around the Caribbean during WW II looking for signs of the war in such conveyances as a rather ramshackle sloop crewed by several Black men. So of course she gets into jams (no, not from the Black men, but rather getting attacked by tsetse flies and then stuck in mud and breaking an axle driving around the Serengeti by herself. She is often testy but transfixed by the animals and, in a throw-away line at the end of that story, tells us that she came back to Africa and actually lived there for a while.

This book didn't make me want to go to any of the places she had been. Most would at any rate have been unrecognizable decades later. What it DID do is make me want to sit down at the computer and start writing up my own horror voyages. And it was the section on her trip to the USSR that made me recognize her honesty. What she encountered in the 1970s was very similar to situations I encountered there 20 years later. I went to a wide range of places in Russia, and the bizarre rules and bureaucratic obstacles remained exactly as she described. Indeed, many of the trips there were real horrors, except for those that were magical.

Travels with myself and others

This book is excellent it’s my absolutely favorite I’m gonna try to get it in hardcover so I can collect it I thoroughly enjoyed it I think you will too

Excellent Horror Travel Book

Brilliant! I love this book. It is the best book I have read on travel because Gellhorn focused on her horror travel stories with humor, wit, and insight. My favorite story was the one about her trek through East Africa in a Land Rover with a gay African guide named Joshua. Forget the movie The African Queen. Joshua was the real deal. He had me laughing out loud, and I felt sorry when their journey ended and they parted. This book made me want to travel and write more about it. I highly recommend this book.

Raw truth of traveling

Absolutely loved the storytelling about the raw truth of traveling without all the bells and whistles we feel untitled too.

Racist Prima Donna

Although there are interesting moments, most of the time she is complaining about service in hotels, restaurants and elsewhere. Her endless racist comments about Africa are loathsome.

Dark side of travel

At first the voice of the narrator seems too young for the age from which Martha Gellhorn writes. But after a few hours one becomes a accustomed to the narrator who hits the right note of edginess and humor.
By the end of the book I reconciled her focus on the negative aspects of travel with her opening observation that listeners seem most interested in the dark side, what goes wrong.

Great Narration of modestly interesting book

Rebecca Lowman is an awesome narrator. The book is fine, but stretches get tedious gives a sense of Gellhorn as a person

Unique Adventures & Political Insights

Martha Bellhorn bares all as she describes the highs and, much more common and irksome, lows of "pioneering" travel escapades peppered throughput her life. This makes for a one-of-a-kind thoughtful read delivered via a strikingly authentic performance.
The reader feels as if she is really there!