On Her Own: Journalistic Adventures from San Francisco to the Chinese Revolution, 1917-27

Book excerpt: Born in 1897, Milly Bennett lived an extraordinary life that led from her native San Francisco, to Honolulu, to China for the revolution, to the Soviet Union on the eve of World War II, to the Spanish Civil War, and home again, a journey punctuated with many love affairs, triumphs, and disappointments. This memoir of Milly's early years through her extended stay in China, places the current political turmoil there into a broader historical perspective. Nominally an autobiography of a remarkable woman and her brief time in China, it goes beyond the narration of an individual life by contributing details of a period of great instability, as well as exploring the sensitive topic of the involvement of foreigners in the internal politics of China.