Books: Very Personal History

CHINA TO ME—Emily Hahn—Doubleday Doran ($3).

In 1926 Emily Hahn became the University of Wisconsin's first woman graduate in mining engineering. Several years later she began to smoke cigars, wrote a satirical guide to seduction (Seductio ad Absurdum). In 1930 she turned up in the Belgian Congo wearing shorts and pith helmet, and wrote a book about it (With Naked Foot). After a spell as a reporter in London, footloose Emily's flight from the domestic atmosphere of Winnetka took her in 1935 to newspaper work in Shanghai and an unconventional apartment in the city's...