Eine Frau allein

you can tell that this is a biographical novel as some of the passion is missing where in a literay novel it would be pulled out.
However there is enough in this to make me even more interested in Agnes.
I do wonder if we are related

3 stars for craft, 5 for guts and heart and the raw power of Agnes Smedley's life story. And this only describes the beginning! Really a memoir, but the minimal fictionalization allows her to touch deep emotions that straight memoir would have been compelled to avoid and more craft would have tried to mask or ironize. It's essential reading for any woman who's ever taken part in a revolutionary movement, and joins Elaine Brown's A Taste of Power, Mary Crow Dog's Lakota Woman, and Roxanne Dunbar's Red Dirt and Outlaw Woman on my shelf of best true stories of dangerous American women. Smedley precedes them all, an outrider in her time - and still an outrider in ours, unfortunately. ( )

Agnes Smedley, (February 23, 1892 – 6 May 1950) was an American journalist and writer known for her chronicling of the Chinese revolution. The book focus is on her time in China.

She embraced and advocated various issues including women's rights, Indian independence, birth control, and China's Communist Revolution. Smedley authored eight books; she wrote articles in many periodicals such as Asia, The New Republic, Nation, Vogue, and Life. A website on Smedley states, "Influenced by her impoverished childhood Agnes Smedley was an advocate for women, children, peasants and liberation for the oppressed." ( )

This is an interesting book because it is about a subject and time not otherwise written about (or at least known to me) much in American literature, from a woman's point of view. Lovers of Steinbeck would find much to admire and enjoy here. It is a very ideological work. Smedley, after all, was a champion of the Chinese revolution and friend of Mao Tse-tung.
It is beautifully and evocatively written, so it does not read like a treatise, but it is a fundamentally political work - feminist and socialist. It is about STRENGTH and politics.

If you are interested in rural poverty, and fighting against the odds and limitations in early 20th century America, you will find much in this book. Fans of Maya Angelou may like this too. ( )