Inside of Time; My Journey From Alaska to Israel

New York: Carroll & Graf Publishers, 2003. First Carroll & Graf edition 2003 [stated]. Presumed first printing. Hardcover. Very good/Very good. xvii, [1], 381, [1] pages. Illustrations. Maps. Appendix. Index. Inscribed and dated by the author on the half-title. Ruth Gruber (September 30, 1911 - November 17, 2016) was an American journalist, photographer, writer, humanitarian, and a United States government official. She was a recipient of the Norman Mailer Prize. During World War II, Secretary of the Interior Harold L. Ickes appointed Gruber as his Special Assistant. In this role, she carried out a study on the prospects of Alaska for homesteading G.I.s after the war. In 1944, she was assigned a secret mission to Europe to bring one thousand Jewish refugees and wounded American soldiers from Italy to the US. In 2011, at the age of 100, Ruth Gruber's work as a photojournalist - spanning six decades on four continents - was the subject of a retrospective exhibition at the International Center of Photography in New York. The exhibition, Ruth Gruber: Photojournalist, curated by Maya Benton, is traveling internationally through 2020. Derived from a Kirkus review: Intriguing historical circumstances distinguish this memoir by Gruber, onetime official in the FDR Administration and a Mideast correspondent during the years that saw the birth of Israel. Gruber begins in 1941, when Harold Ickes asked her to serve as his field representative in Alaska. That not-yet state commands a large portion of Gruber's text, as she recalls traveling about the wilderness and taking her own measure of it, She also details at length her experiences covering the plight of displaced Jews immediately following WWII, which prompted her to go head-to-head with anti-Semites in the US Department of State, and with the British colonial administration. Her tales of being in harm's way display real power, whether the danger is physical—slogging through Alaska, dodging Nazis to spirit away refugees—or emotional, as when she reports on camps for displaced Jews in Germany, and Israel. The author' ingenuous storytelling gives verve to momentous events.