Ah, Emily! It is perhaps appropriate that Emily Hahn was friends with Chinese writer and Kuomintang spy Lin Yutang, who despite his dubious politics was a fantastic philosopher and writer. Among his best known works was "The Art of Living," and Emily Hahn could serve as the poster girl for the Western version of his ideals.

Her mythology is well known, although not as well as it deserves to be: she elbowed her way into a male-only university department, lived alone in New York, and drove cross-country with a girlfriend in a time when such things Just Weren't Done. Once she'd exhausted the adventurous possibilities of North America, she struck out for Africa and then China.

She was a bohemian in Shanghai, and her flat enjoyed visits from even a grubby, earnest young Mao Zedong and the ever-dapper Zhou Enlai. Unlike other China Hands, though, Hahn mainly shied from revolutionary company in favor of the decidedly bourgeois literati, led by handsome dandy poet Shao Xunmei. (Read "Shanghai Modern" for more on him.) Hahn became Shao's lover and later concubine, and together they launched the literary magazine Tianxia, "Under Heaven". Emily was also a fixture in the expatriate scene, writing for the New Yorker and known for showing up at Victor Sassoon's lavish parties with a pet baboon in tow, clad in diapers after a few unfortunate mishaps.

She moved with the war to Chongqing, and from there to Hong Kong, where she began an indiscret affair and had an illegitimate child with the head of British Secret Services. She sat out the Japanese occupation, returned to the States after the war ended, and then moved with her lover to England.

Emily Hahn was more a writer and professional character than a journalist. Her best works are autobiographical, and when she ventured into research the result was painfully propagandistic puff pieces.

But that is the problem with this biography: Emily Hahn's life had already been documented with both care and color in her own writings, so Cuthbertson's account mostly rehashes Emily's own words in more prosaic terms. The main advantage is to find out the historical characters behind the fictional names, and to have a clearer chronology than Hahn's writing provides.

The thing is, Emily Hahn didn't lead that interesting or colorful or significant a life, not compared to the many other young Americans lured to the East at the same time. Rather, she was so talented at describing people, places, events with a sharply bemused eye for the ironic idiosyncracy. That is what makes her intriguing.

While I don't necessarily agree that Emily Hahn has been forgotten (see, for instance, Prisoners in Paradise: American Women in the Wartime South Pacific) I do believe that a biography about her helps us to understand the complexities of women's lives in the 20th century. Ken Cuthbertson has done a competent job of outlining Hahn's life and his prose is just about as lively as her adventures. However, I think his historical analysis is weak, especially in the matter of feminism, which was so controversial during Hahn's lifetime. Putting her life in sharper perspective with the historical times would have made this a fuller biography. But for people who don't really care about that, they will certainly enjoy the retelling of Hahn's fast-paced life and may even be motivated to dig up some of Hahn's own books.

I knew nothing about Emily Hahn and I picked this book up being intrigued by a synopsis. It is a very well written book about an extraordinary life. Emily (Mickey) Hahn broke every convention of her time: a woman who studied mining engineering in collage, a lone white woman in Africa in the early 1930's, a single woman in China, an American "married" to a Chinese as his concubine and a journalist caught in the Japanese invasion of that country. Hopefully, I have said enough to tickle the interest of would-be readers since I don't want to give away any more.

This is a life story that reads like a novel. Why the Chinese portion of this book has not been made into a movie is a surprise to me. There is a cinematic quality of Ms. Hahn's life in China (which she wrote about herself) that cries out for filming. Ken Cuthbertson tells the story of this life without judgement calls does not clutter his book with useless facts. The book is illustrated with photographs spread throughout the chapters where they are needed. I could not recommend this book more highly.

While approximately 30% of this book is taken up with interesting stories about life abroad in the early part of the 20th century, in no way, shape, or form is this book actually a memoir. It is a collection of her old New Yorker articles, most of which do not even deal with her life abroad. In fact, the majority of the chapters comprise uninteresting tales of her domestic life -- not quite what the title implies, either.

The foreward states, in a fit of honesty that apparently didn't make it to either the title or back-cover copy, that Hahn was under contract to write a memoir, and instead, since she had already been paid and didn't much feel like writing anything more, took a bunch of her old New Yorker clippings and sent them in to her publisher. Anyhow, it certainly shows.

I had heard of Hahn before, and was interested in reading about her China exploits in particular. One could understand, then, that I would be quite chagrined to find that fully the first half of the book is taken up with boring childhood reminiscences of St. Louis and Chicago, and that the last few stories are set once Hahn has become safely re-domiciled in NYC, and concern similarly banal domestic issues.

This is not to say that there is no merit whatsoever in the book. At least a few of the stories are good and interesting: one or two about her life in the Congo, one about the Japanese occupation of Hong Kong, another two about Shanghai and her opium addiction. But even, with these, her writing style is usually so insubstantial, so affectedly flaky, like Dorothy Parker after a partial lobotomy or a teenaged girl dumbing it down so the boys like her, that I would in all likelihood not have liked this book had it been what its title and packaging claimed it to be.

This book is mostly just a collection of irrelevant, poorly written prose that was slapped together to pay the bills. The publisher should have demanded his money back.

In his lively and evocative Introduction to this book, Hahn biographer Ken Cuthbertson says that Emily Hahn "moved from here to there to everywhere, like some sort of multi-colored and quixotic literary butterfly" for around forty-seven years. Sheila McGrath, in her Foreword, looks through a different lens, seeing "an inborn and unyielding independence that must have been difficult to maintain," a wholly original woman who traveled, had adventures, made friends, and wrote about all of it with an unflagging energy and dedication. She lived exactly as she chose to, for her entire long life.

This book is a collection of essays that Hahn herself assembled in 1970, in order to fulfill a commitment she'd made to a publisher to produce an autobiography, which she was loathe to write, according to Cuthbertson. There are several delightful pieces on Hahn's good childhood and school days in the American midwest, and then the rest bright and incredible travel pieces - letters home, really - that appeared in The New Yorker magazine, from 1937 to 1970. (One describes a cross-country trip she and a friend made one summer during the '20's, as undergraduates, in a Model T). Artful and sensitive ordering of these pieces supplies the reader with a chronology. Unfortunately, the pieces are undated, so you must guess as to date of writing, and date of publication.

Hahn's adventures and quirky and strong views are fabulous and charming - and quaint at times. From "The Big Smoke": "Though I had always wanted to be an opium addict, I can't claim that as a reason I went to China." She supplies a witty and thorough description of how she did it. (And later, of how she kicked the habit.) In other venues she had a pet gibbon named Mr. Mills, she lived in the jungle for a while, and was literally trapped in Shanghai for a spell. Amazing things, reported in a calm - but playful - voice. The people she met and got to know are drawn less fully than her escapades. You, in turn, never really get to know them, either.

Hahn does not go deep so much as range far and wide. She has a great ear, an even better eye, and is fearless. That she reported so dryly and well on her doings in the US, the Congo, China, Japan, England and Europe is the icing on the cake. A very good and atmospheric read.

'Emily Hahn was an original--a first-generation feminist who chose not to be called one, a woman of courage who constantly underplayed it, a reporter of the acts of men and animals, whose peculiar likeness she grasped perhaps better than any other writer of her time. Above all, she was a prose stylist, a plain writer whose simplicities are never simple, and whose every sentence ends with a sharp, clean bite. Her (beautifully) episodic memoirs can stand alongside those of M. F. K. Fisher, who she in so many ways resembled, as a model of clarity, precision, calm sensuality, carefully weighed sadness.' --Adam Gopnik, New Yorker writer