BUSTING STONES by Jim DeFilippi

Martha Gellhorn was the greatest war correspondent in American history, but she was/is unknown, unappreciated, undervalued because of her sex.

BUSTING STONES tracks her life against the backdrop of the 20th Century Women’s Movement. The book breaks the ten decades of her life (1908-1998) into ten chapters, each chapter containing a short segment on:

1. The mood of the country during that time;
2. The progress or the stagnancy of the decade’s Women’s Movement;
3. An enemy of the country or of women (anyone from Adolph Hitler to Hugh Hefner);
4. Gellhorn’s life;
5. Her progress as a writer;
6. Her tragedy.

An added section (The 2000’s) highlights how her fire and spirit are still alive in today’s American women.

Some key elements:

In the 1940’s, her future husband, Ernest Hemingway, usurped her Collier Magazine correspondent’s credentials because he wanted to cover the Normandy Invasion. He wound up getting into a drunken car accident and spent the invasion in a London hospital bed.

Meanwhile Gellhorn, without any credentialing, snuck aboard a Navy hospital ship and became the only woman among the 195,000 men to land at Normandy.

Decades later, the horrors of Vietnam and her own rape destroyed her will and her strength, leading to her suicide.

Warning: I am primarily a crime novelist. The voice of this book is not Doris Kearns Goodwin historian. It is more street-corner thug. A fake-tough man writing about a real-tough woman. This lends a quirky irony to the text and to the subject matter.