The journalists of the post-War generation are now settling down
to write their autobiographies. " After the men as the blurb has it—comes Marguerite IliirriScin with Born for Trouble (Gollancz, 12s. 6d.). In 1918 she gave up a job on the Baltimore Sun to investigate conditions in- Germany. Nominally she went as a reporter, though she was in fact working for the U.S: ••Milittity Intelligenee Department. Her account of life and events in Berlin during the momentous days between the Armistice and the Peace Treaty...is Jull, and based on a sound understanding of German polities and character. Behind the apparent triumph of the Socialists she. sensed the hardening of reactionary opinion, and foresaw the rise of the Nazis. This is the best part of the book ; the rest of it ranges too widely and superficially to grip one's serious attention. Of adventure there is plenty : she went to Poland and interviewed Pilsudski ; investigated Russian affairs and was twice imprisoned and then deported, though she managed to interview Lenin and Trotsky first ; she visited China and Japan, and then Russia again where she was imprisoned, for the third time and - finally joined an expedition to take films of native life in the Near East. Miss Harrison writes well, but the book lacks that indefinable spiritual quality without which journalistic autobiography is of no more than passing interest.
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