How It Really Was: A Memoir of "The Greatest Generation" by Patricia Hunter Gray is her personal account of her life's adventures, beginning with growing up in a small Indiana town during the Depression era, where her family was as hard-hit by bad times as everywhere else. Patricia enjoyed travel a great deal, going from one end America to the other, and then eventually traveling around the globe. A most thoughtfully written and engaging autobiography, How It Really Was is a truly wonderful account of varied people, events, and places in a restless, yet highly enjoyable lifetime.

This straight from the hip shot at life in a small Indiana town is really how it was. I, too, grew up in the town of Morocco, Indiana and even though the author had escaped from its limiting confines by that time, it remained and still remains basically the same. Anyone wanting to sample the flavor of a small mid-western town in the l920s 30s and 40s should put this book on their required reading list. Even though the author continued her exploration of the big, wide, world out there after she left the town, she retains many of the timeless values she learned in her early years. Her continuing desire for greater experiences and wider knowledge of the world and its peoples is something that many of us can appreciate. It is very well written and a joy to read.

What a great thing she did for women when she wrote this book! The things that her kids wrote on the trip through Europe made the book even better. It shows what an independent woman can do with her life.