“I have to say that Ruth Weiss is a most unexpected personality, and hers is an unexpected book. … I know – knowing her so well, so long – that she has not been prompted by vanity; nothing could be further from her nature. I believe that, considering her life, she came to see, as anyone reading this book will, that fate, chance, and accident of birth and the drama of history – call it what you will –have woven her life into a pattern belonging specifically to our century, a piece of social history that should not be kept to herself, but set down for us, her contemporaries. … The time for summing-up is here in the tenth decade.”
