At Agadir in Morocco, reports Peter Kolosimo, the French captain Lafanechere "discovered a complete arsenal of hunting weapons including five hundred double-edged axes weighing seventeen and a half pounds, i.e. twenty times as heavy as would be convenient for modern man. Apart from the question of weight, to handle the axe at all one would need to have hands of a size appropriate to a giant with a stature of at least 13 feet." 2 (See Australian Giants; La Tene; South American Giants) In counterpoint to these extended essays and profiles are hundreds and hundreds of short takes, seemingly chosen at random, culled by Gunther’s eagle eye as he scoured the country. Here are mundane conversations overheard; meetings with governors and senators; quotes from lunatic right-wing newspapers; the uninhibited talk of millionaires and sharecroppers. Gunther’s teenage readers recognized Death Be Not Proud ’s redemptive message. It was a book about an individual whose selflessness was his most salient feature. As an eighth-grade boy in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, put it, “His fight for life was not only for his mortal body but the lives of millions of people.” But Johnny’s wasn’t the self-sacrifice of a Christ figure or the hardened courage of a soldier. It was something altogether more recognizable to young readers. Students put themselves in the shoes of Johnny, Frances, or John. Teachers encouraged that sympathetic identification by asking their pupils to write essays from the perspective of one of the “characters” in the book. And yet, adolescents were so gripped by Death Be Not Proud precisely because it wasn’t fiction. Like Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl, which was translated into English in 1952, Gunther’s memoir demonstrated how life had outpaced fiction, as “millions of people all over the world,” in the words of one Connecticut girl, shared in the “tragedy of your son’s death.” It wasn’t “like the average book,” she added, “perhaps because this really happened.” Teenagers requested photos of Johnny, details of his science experiments, more information about the couple’s divorce. “Some people would say, ‘Oh, its only a story, don’t let it bother you’,” one reader wrote; “but when you realize that it actually took place, it makes a person stop and think.” Hamilton, John M. (2009) Journalism's Roving Eye: A History of American Foreign Reporting. Louisiana State University Press.

Cuthbertson, Ken (1992). Inside: The Biography of John Gunther. Bonus Books. pp. 5–8. ISBN 978-0929387703. A novel, “The Indian Sign,” is scheduled for publication by Harper & Row June 17. Four other published fiction works were unsuccesful. The volume, whose fortunate name Mr. Gunther did not de cide on until shortly before pub lication, was, he said, “written from a definite point of view; it is that the accidents of per sonality play a great role in his tory.” The book began with a profile of Hitler that was so unflattering (“I wrote, among other things, that the Führer was nil sexually”) that it earned for Mr. Gunther a place on the Gestapo's death list dur ing World War‐II. According to Michael Bloch, Gunther enjoyed a same-sex relationship in the 1930s in Vienna with the future Leader of the British Labour Party, Hugh Gaitskell. [7]Inside U.S.A. is a nonfiction book by John Gunther, first published in 1947 and one of that year's best-selling nonfiction books in the United States. It describes the author's observations during 13months of travel through the then-48 U.S. states beginning in November 1944. Woolery, George W. (1985). Children's Television: The First Thirty-Five Years, 1946-1981, Part II: Live, Film, and Tape Series. The Scarecrow Press. pp.248–249. ISBN 0-8108-1651-2. The book inspired and gave its name to a 1948 Broadway musical revue, Inside U.S.A., that was very loosely based on the book. [19]

Gunther married Jane Perry Vandercook in 1948; the two adopted a son. Jane P. Gunther, a devoted student of the arts who accompanied her husband on his voyages and contributed to his books, was born in August 1916. She died in New York City, on May 22, 2020, at the age of 103. She had been widowed for a week shy of half a century. [10] Ethiopia is next on the list, where Haile Selassie is described with the least respect I have seen - referred to as dainty and 'exceptionally short'; although the author was granted an audience. He does a reasonable job of describing the emperor's rule over the recent period. Eritrea and the Somalia's (French, British and actual) get a brief description, focussed mostly on the 'secret' American military base in Eritrea (comms & weather). The Gunthers had two children: Judy, who died in 1929 before the age of 1, and John Jr. (Johnny), who was born in 1929 and died in 1947 of a brain tumor. The Gunthers divorced in 1944. [3] Nebraska. “Some early villages were so small that, for a time, each had only one church; Catholics and Protestants worshiped in the same room, with half the pews facing an altar at one end, half a pulpit at the other.” He submitted a chapter at time to his publishers, and he constantly revised galley proofs, to keep his narrative current, up to the last moment before the book went to press. (The same procedure was used for the “Inside” books that fol lowed.)

Gunther intended to write a companion book, to be titled Inside Washington, focused on the nation-scale problems, personalities, and institutions of the U.S. He never completed the second book, because of the amount that would be required and because he could not decide how best to coordinate the publication timing with the quadrennial cycle of presidential elections. A revised edition of Inside U.S.A. was released in 1951. [5] He later continued his "Inside" series with three more books: Inside Africa in 1955, Inside Russia Today in 1958, and Inside Europe Today in 1961. [2] A 50th anniversary edition of Inside U.S.A. was published in 1997 ( ISBN 978-1-56584-358-5). [20] a b Lakin, Matt (May 27, 2012). " 'Ugliest city' insult prompts beautification efforts in Knoxville". Knoxville News Sentinel. Careful as he was, Mr. Gun ther couldn't get everywhere and learn everything, and inev itably he made errors in fact (such as a reference in “Inside Russia Today” to a nonexistent 25‐kopek piece) and judgment (his verdict, in “Inside U.S.A.,” that Earl Warren, then Gover nor of California, “will never set the world on fire or even make it smoke”).

a b "Gunther, Frances Fineman. Papers, 1915-1963: A Finding Aid". Arthur and Elizabeth Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America. Harvard University Library/ Radcliffe College. September 1991. Archived from the original on July 3, 2018 . Retrieved December 2, 2012. Spain - (Spanish Morocco, Spanish Sahara (Western Sahara), Spanish Guinea (Equatorial Guinea).) Spanish Morocco is the only of the three which gets more than a few sentences. Spanish Morocco is heavily militarised, and doesn't really get a short summary from Gunther. He worked briefly in the city as a reporter for the Chicago Daily News, but he soon moved to Europe to be a correspondent with the Daily News London bureau, where he covered Europe, the Balkans, and the Middle East. Mr. Gunther's admirers were grateful for his grasp of sheer scope, the enthusiasm apparent in his reporting and his gift for popularizing remote places by describing them bluntly and with feeling. By noting a seem ingly small detail, he could bring a place, a people, into sharp focus for his readers. This book, now half a century old, is an astonishing tour de force. It presents a shrewd, fast-moving, sparkling panorama of the United States at this historic moment of apparent triumph. Sinclair Lewis called it "the richest treasure-house of facts about America that has ever been published, and probably the most spirited and interesting." At the same time, in its preoccupations and insights Inside U.S.A. foresaw dilemmas and paradoxes that were to harass and frustrate Americans for the rest of the century. [6]

Cuthbertson, Ken (October 2002). Inside: The Biography of John Gunther. pp.241–243. ISBN 9780759232884. When they start dancing," continues Kittler, "the Watusi discard their usual reserve and become frenzied.... Twisting, bending, squirming, they leap into the air, breaking high-jump records with-out missing a beat. They carry spears, and when one jumper soars especially high the others throw down their spears in defeat. But the dance goes on. Ankle bracelets heavy with bells match the earth-trembling thunder of twenty royal drummers. First ten men dance, then fifty, then two hundred, their speed increasing with their number as they fly through intricate routines with thrilling precision and flair." 5 Gunther's experiences as a journalist in interwar Vienna formed the basis for his novel The Lost City. [8]

During World War I, the family changed the spelling of its name from Guenther to Gunther to avoid having an obviously-German name. [2]From the April 1997 issue: Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. on John Gunther and the writing of Inside U.S.A. Although Mr. Gunther earned millions of dollars over the years, he was constantly strapped. This was partly due to the fact that he paid up to half of his own expenses on his globe‐girdling jaunts, but per haps more important, he told an interviewer, “I've eaten ev ery book by the time it's pub lished.” I was ravenously interested in human beings,” he said. “I never really got a big scoop in my life, and the little ones got were just plain accidents.I wasn't one of those reporters who managed to be on the scene when things happened. I was generally somewhere else. Matter of fact, I never really gave a damn about spot news. The idea of beating The Asso ciated Press by six minutes bored me silly.” The Belgian Congo, no longer suffering under the reign of terror that still lives on in popular imagination, now struggles to develop its natural resources, in what was then at least a rich but relatively underpopulated land. White immigration is discouraged to prevent the racial tensions suffered by the British colonies, and white settlers get as much political rights as natives, which is to say none. "The European community in the Congo...must be the largest group of white people totally devoid of voting power anywhere in the free world" Gunther begins his discovery of America in California — “the most spectacular and most diversified American state, California so ripe, golden, yeasty, churning in flux. … at once demented and very sane, adolescent and mature” — and he proceeds around the country, state by state, until he arrives in Arizona, next door to where he began. Sometimes he devotes an entire chapter to a single person — the perpetual presidential candidate-to-be Harold Stassen; the great industrialist Henry Kaiser; New York’s colorful (to say the least) Mayor Fiorello La Guardia, who is probably best remembered for having, during a strike of newspaper deliverers, read “the funnies” aloud on the radio so as not to disappoint the city’s kids.