Marvine Howe
Having reported for The New York Times for most of my professional life, I bowed out of the daily news business in 1995 to write about my favorite countries and people with the luxury of time and space offered by books and in-depth articles. My first destination was Turkey, then Morocco and Lebanon and now I have returned to Spain and Portugal.
I was born in Shanghai, China, where my father was teaching chemistry at what was called Hangzhou Christian College. Then major events -- the Japanese incursions and the rise of the Communists -- forced my family to return to the United States, where my father found work as a laboratory chemist in Philadelphia during the Depression. Determined to become a foreign correspondent, I majored in Journalism at Rutgers University, and upon graduation I was accepted at Columbia’s School for Far Eastern Studies, where I hoped to revive my Chinese.
I got sidetracked in Europe, however. After a summer holiday in France, I applied for a job at the International Herald Tribune in Paris but was told to improve my French. Thus I traveled to what was then French Morocco as an au pair with a French military family. It was a stroke of luck; the independence movements in North Africa were taking shape and I was the only American journalist in Fez. Later, I took a job as a newscaster at the French Radio Maroc in Rabat, which gave me a base as a freelancer, and I contributed reports to The Christian Science Monitor, The Middle East Journal, and the British Broadcasting Corporation, among others.
After my book on the Moroccan independence movement, The Prince and I (One Woman’s Morocco in England) was published in 1956, I was hired as a stringer by The New York Times and Time Life, covering the Algerian war and the conflicts in Angola and Mozambique and traveling throughout Africa and the Mediterranean. When I joined the staff of The Times in 1972, I continued to report on such stories as: the military regime in Brazil, the coup against Allende in Chile, the earthquake at Managua, post-revolution convulsions in Portugal, Arab-Israeli conflicts in Lebanon, the British withdrawal from the Gulf, the war in the Sahara, the military coup in Turkey, the Cyprus question, and the Serb clampdown in Kossovo. After serving as bureau chief in Rio de Janeiro, Beirut, Ankara and Athens, I returned to the metropolitan staff of the New York Times in 1984, where I specialized in immigration issues.
Since leaving The Times, I have published Turkey Today: A Nation Divided over Islam’s Revival (Westview Press [Perseus Books], Boulder, 2000) and Morocco: The Islamist Awakening and Other Challenges (Oxford University Press, New York, 2005) as well as articles in The New York Times, World Policy Journal, International Herald Tribune, Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, Middle East Policy, MS Magazine, and Town & Country, among others.
Meanwhile, I have returned to my family's roots in the small college town of Lexington in Virginia's Shenandoah Valley, but have kept my European base at Oeiras, Portugal, where I have just completed Al-Andalus Rediscovered and started working on my next book.
I was born in Shanghai, China, where my father was teaching chemistry at what was called Hangzhou Christian College. Then major events -- the Japanese incursions and the rise of the Communists -- forced my family to return to the United States, where my father found work as a laboratory chemist in Philadelphia during the Depression. Determined to become a foreign correspondent, I majored in Journalism at Rutgers University, and upon graduation I was accepted at Columbia’s School for Far Eastern Studies, where I hoped to revive my Chinese.
I got sidetracked in Europe, however. After a summer holiday in France, I applied for a job at the International Herald Tribune in Paris but was told to improve my French. Thus I traveled to what was then French Morocco as an au pair with a French military family. It was a stroke of luck; the independence movements in North Africa were taking shape and I was the only American journalist in Fez. Later, I took a job as a newscaster at the French Radio Maroc in Rabat, which gave me a base as a freelancer, and I contributed reports to The Christian Science Monitor, The Middle East Journal, and the British Broadcasting Corporation, among others.
After my book on the Moroccan independence movement, The Prince and I (One Woman’s Morocco in England) was published in 1956, I was hired as a stringer by The New York Times and Time Life, covering the Algerian war and the conflicts in Angola and Mozambique and traveling throughout Africa and the Mediterranean. When I joined the staff of The Times in 1972, I continued to report on such stories as: the military regime in Brazil, the coup against Allende in Chile, the earthquake at Managua, post-revolution convulsions in Portugal, Arab-Israeli conflicts in Lebanon, the British withdrawal from the Gulf, the war in the Sahara, the military coup in Turkey, the Cyprus question, and the Serb clampdown in Kossovo. After serving as bureau chief in Rio de Janeiro, Beirut, Ankara and Athens, I returned to the metropolitan staff of the New York Times in 1984, where I specialized in immigration issues.
Since leaving The Times, I have published Turkey Today: A Nation Divided over Islam’s Revival (Westview Press [Perseus Books], Boulder, 2000) and Morocco: The Islamist Awakening and Other Challenges (Oxford University Press, New York, 2005) as well as articles in The New York Times, World Policy Journal, International Herald Tribune, Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, Middle East Policy, MS Magazine, and Town & Country, among others.
Meanwhile, I have returned to my family's roots in the small college town of Lexington in Virginia's Shenandoah Valley, but have kept my European base at Oeiras, Portugal, where I have just completed Al-Andalus Rediscovered and started working on my next book.