Looking for Trouble

The rediscovered memoir of an American gossip columnist turned “amazingly brilliant reporter” (The New York Times Book Review) as she reports from the frontlines of the Spanish Civil War and World War II “A long-overlooked classic that could not be timelier or more engrossing.”—Paula McLain, author of The Paris Wife Foreword by Christina Lamb, Sunday Times chief foreign correspondent and co-author of I Am Malala Virginia Cowles was just twenty-seven years old when she decided to transform herself from a society columnist into a foreign press correspondent. Looking for Trouble is the story of this evolution, as Cowles reports from both sides of the Spanish Civil War, London on the first day of the Blitz, Nazi-run Munich, and Finland’s bitter, bloody resistance to the Russian invasion. Along the way, Cowles also meets Adolf Hitler (“an inconspicuous little man”), Benito Mussolini, Winston Churchill, Martha Gellhorn, and Ernest Hemingway. Her reportage blends sharp political analysis with a gossip columnist’s chatty approachability and a novelist’s empathy. Cowles understood in 1937—long before even the average politician—that Fascism in Europe was a threat to democracy everywhere. Her insights on extremism are as piercing and relevant today as they were eighty years ago.