Business bookshelf: 'Dangerous Ambition'
Dorothy Thompson and Rebecca West were career women long before the term had been invented. In the 1930s, when Thompson and West were making their mark as established professionals, a Gallup poll recorded that 82 percent of the American population believed women "should not have paying jobs outside the home" if their husbands were employed. Yet both women worked consistently from their early 20s in occupations that were almost entirely male-dominated -- Thompson as a foreign correspondent and then a political commentator; West as a literary critic, lauded novelist, historian and travel writer.
Susan Hertog's biography, a synthesis of these two lives and the parallels between them, is also a history of the 20th century, a study of female emancipation and literary culture.
The most striking similarity between Thompson and West is their seemingly innate self-belief and fearlessness. On her 27th birthday in 1920, the American-born Thompson sailed for England. With no contacts but with portfolio in hand, her goal was to gain credentials as a freelance reporter and make her way across Europe to witness the aftermath of the revolution in Russia. By 1927 she was living in Berlin as the first female head of a news bureau in Europe. West, the daughter of an Anglo-Irish journalist who abandoned his family when she was 8, was a reviewer and essayist by the time she was 19, when "regardless of reputation" she published cutting critiques of established writers such as Arnold Bennett and George Bernard Shaw. West wrote until her death at 90 in 1983, and was in the enviable position of having Harold Ross, the editor of the New Yorker, write to her, pleading: "Please write any story you want for us, fact or fiction."
THE ECONOMIST
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The staples distributor issue added to a mixed quarterly report for Medtronic, which is run out of Fridley.