The first part of the autobiography of Negley Farson, a foreign correspondent for the Chicago Daily News in the 1930s taking him from his childhood in a well connected old American family fallen on hard times with servants whose parents had been slaves to the mid 1930s. What a life he led. Leaving the USA at an early age to try to make his fortune in imperial Russia he witnessed the beginning of the 1917 revolution. He voluteered as a pilot in the RAF in the First World War and then became a newspaper man. He obviously had a talent for friendship and telling a good story. he recycles a lot of work he submitted to his newspapers and from other books but he puts it all together well. |He would have made a great dinner companion. ( )

I stumbled across this book without knowing what to expect. What I found was a marvelously entertaining autobiography by a man who really seems to have lived life to the fullest in pre-WWII America (this is the first of two volumes of his autobiography and ends just at the start of WWII). His name may not be recognized these days, but his book is highly recommended. This book has made me want to track down his other books (he wrote a number). ( )