The title of this book could describe the
weather we are having here in the northeast this week, except that it’s not even officially winter here yet!
Brrr…Anyway, the subtitle reveals that the book is about so much more than the temperature — It’s another one I
learned about from Powell’s that I really, really want to read. It sounds like a fascinating memoir.
The Coldest Winter: A Stringer in Liberated Europe
is the story of Paula Fox’s year as a stringer for a small news service in Europe in 1946, at a time when the “haunted
continent” was still mostly untouched by tourists. Fox recounts her year traveling through war-weary cities like
London, Warsaw, Paris, Prague and Madrid. And this was after sailing solo from New York to London too! Before heading
to Europe myself this winter, I’d like to read this story of another woman who traveled it on her own, as a writer, at
a difficult and completely different time in history.