Here comes Ruth Gruber again, now ninety-five years old, telling more of the story of her long life and career. [See the notice for her earlier memoir, Ahead of Time, CJR, March/April 2001.] She again tells of the Soviet Arctic, Jewish refugees, and the early days of Israel. But this time she handsomely illuminates the story with nearly two hundred of her on-the-spot photographs, covering the period from the 1930s into the 1950s, an era now far in the past but with this particular witness surviving to recall it.

James Boylan is CJR’s founding editor.