INSIDE AFRICA.

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Seen from an airplane flying into Spokane, “Some fields looked like maple leaves and some like richly scrambled eggs. Think of all the redheaded girls you ever met; they are all down there in the wheat — auburn, russet, titian, chestnut, sandy. Then throw in the blondes.” This is far from being Gunther’s only salute to blondes. The book is divided into 52 chapters, organized by geography. Its geographical structure begins in California, continues through other western states to the Great Plains and Midwest, then east to the Northeast and Southeast, then west to Texas and Oklahoma, and finally to the "new states" of New Mexico and Arizona. Factual information about topics like geography, population, and history is commingled with highly opinionated statements ( Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. called some of these opinions "flip judgments" [5]) about United States places and people. According to Gunther, Southern California was "the California of petroleum, crazy religious cults, the citrus industry, ... the weirdest architecture in the United States, ... and devotees of funny money", and a place where "climate is worshipped as a god". [13] Gunther described Phoenix, Arizona as the "cleanest city" he saw and Indianapolis as "the dirtiest." [14] He called Knoxville, Tennessee, "an extremely puritanical town" and the "ugliest city" he saw. [15] (The remarks about Indianapolis' dirtiness and Knoxville's ugliness spurred both of these cities to start beautification efforts and led Knoxville to establish the annual Dogwood Arts Festival. [5] [15]) He said that the "best beef" he ate was in Montana, the "best single meal" in Milwaukee, and the "best ice cream" in Richmond, Virginia. [14] No other country, Gunther says, “could have headlines like WAR WITH JAPAN PERILS WORLD SERIES … or the sign on the Success Cafe in Butte in 1932, EAT HERE OR I’LL VOTE FOR HOOVER, or another headline, one from a New York tabloid about a woman soon to be electrocuted, SHE’LL BURN, SIZZLE, FRY!” Hamilton, John M. (2009) Journalism's Roving Eye: A History of American Foreign Reporting. Louisiana State University Press.

Why … should Texas have what seem to be the prettiest girls in the world? … Walk across the campus at Austin, or roam the downtown streets of Dallas; there are more Miss Americas per square yard than anywhere else in the country per square mile.” Cuthbertson, Ken (October 2002). Inside: The Biography of John Gunther. pp.247–256. ISBN 9780759232884. John Gunther, (born Aug. 30, 1901, Chicago—died May 29, 1970, New York City), journalist and author who became famous for his series of sociopolitical books describing and interpreting for American readers various regions of the world, beginning with Inside Europe (1936). Vienna's Cafe Louvre in the 1920s & 1930s: Meeting Place for Foreign Correspondents | Coffeehouse | Nazi Germany". Scribd. Born Aug. 30, 1901, on Chi cago's North Side, John Joseph Gunther was the son of Eugene M. Gunther and the former Li sette Shoeninger. His mother was a schoolteacher and his fa ther “dabbled in real estate and excelled at drinking,” Mr. Gun ther said. He had one sister, Jean.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. Gunther's experiences as a journalist in interwar Vienna formed the basis for his novel The Lost City. [8] 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) Atlanta is supposed to rank fairly high among Southern cities in its attitude toward Negroes, but it out-ghettoes anything I saw in a European ghetto, even in Warsaw. What I looked at was caste and untouchability — half the time I blinked remembering that this was not India.” the bubbling, blazing days of American foreign correspondence in Europe. ... Most of us traveled steadily, met constantly, exchanged information, caroused, took in each other's washing, and, even when most fiercely competitive, were devoted friends. ... We were scavengers, buzzards, out to get the news, no matter whose wings got clipped. [6]

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 was born in Chicago in 1901, went to the University of Chicago and then on to The Chicago Daily News, where in 1924 he scored with an eyewitness report on the Teapot Dome — not the tremendous scandal but the actual place (in Wyoming), to which no previous journalist had bothered to go. (“Teapot Dome has no resemblance whatever to a teapot or a dome.”) By the next year he was in London for The Daily News, and soon was darting around Europe on missions to Berlin, Moscow, Rome, Paris, Poland, Spain, the Balkans and Scandinavia, before being given the Vienna bureau. It was as if he had been in training for “Inside Europe.” For more than 30 years, Mr. Gunther was looked to by stay‐at‐home public for his live ly, informed descriptions of the world at large. He traveled more miles, crossed more bor ders, interviewed more states men, wrote more books and sold more copies than any other single journalist of his time. At least 15 of his books were translated into more than 90 languages.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] To the task of writing “In side Europe,” “Inside Russia,” “Inside Africa” and all the oth er “Inside” books that brought him considerable fame and re spectable fortune, John Gunther brought a breathless curiosity, sharp ears and eyes for the offbeat fact, a consuming vital ity, a gregarious charm and a crusader's zeal to tell his read ers what he thought they might not know about other people and other places.

About Inside Europe (published in 1936), Gunther wrote, "This book has had a striking success all over the world. I was fortunate in that it appeared at just the right time, when the three totalitarian dictators took the stage and people began to be vitally interested in them." Johnny with his mother after his brain-cancer diagnosis, which he received in the spring of 1946 (Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America / Harvard University)

John J. Gunther, About the Author, Biography at Harper Collins Publishers, Accessed 22 October 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. Portugal - Portuguese policy seems to consist of keeping them from any modern advancements, and retaining slave labour.

a b "Guide to the John Gunther Papers 1935–1967". University of Chicago Library. 2006 . Retrieved April 18, 2013. Rather than a few sentences bout each, I will paraphrase what Gunther says about each of the colonial powers in place in Africa at the time of writing:

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A tribe of giants survives in the Sudan, but apparently little has been written about them. In his Inside Africa, John Gunther de-scribes them as a Nilotic peoples who "have spread their virile blood far afield, as witness the Masai in Kenya and the giant Watutsi 3 in Ruanda-Urundi, who are cousins to the Hamitic Sudanese." 4 An example of their gigantic but very slender stature may be seen in Manute Bol, the seven-foot-seven-inch pro basketball giant, who hails from this region. Slim as he still looks, Bol has put on quite a bit of weight since his rookie year in the NBA. One sports writer jokingly wrote that he has now "added enough poundage to require at least two pinstripes on his pajamas."