The Double Life of Katharine Clark

September 1, 2022

First-time author Gregorio unearths a family secret about her great-aunt's journalistic work behind the Iron Curtain. She used her degree in history from Dartmouth and her degree in international relations from the London School of Economics and Political Science to write a book about her. Voice actor Holly Adams uses her rich alto voice to take listeners to Yugoslavia under Tito. Gregorio paints a picture of the beauty and horror of living under a Communist dictatorship while trying to catch the next great story. Katharine Clark meets and befriends Milovan Djilas, a former Communist leader once tapped to succeed Tito. Djilas was ousted from the party for criticizing the communist leaders of Yugoslavia, and he had a story to tell. Clark takes on the mission of getting his writings to Western readers. This true story sometimes takes on the excitement of a Cold War spy movie and sometimes runs to the mundanity of two friends sipping cups of tea. Listeners will appreciate Adams's voices that keep the players in this drama straight; she will land them right in the Cold War-era Communist Bloc. VERDICT This is a remarkable true story with a strong female lead.--Laura Trombley

Copyright 2022 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

January 17, 2022
Gregorio debuts with a rousing and rigorously researched biography of her great-aunt Katharine Clark, a foreign correspondent for the International News Service in Eastern Europe during the early years of the Cold War. In 1955, Clark, who was married to Time-Life correspondent Ed Clark, befriended Milovan Djilas, a high-ranking Communist Party official who had been stripped of his posts “and the trappings that went with them” for criticizing the Yugoslav government and calling “for the establishment of a second party to foster freedom of expression.” Clark proposed to help Djilas get a series of articles published in the American press and offered to take dictation, “molding and shaping the words to maximize their impact in English.” (To prevent the secret police from listening in on their exchanges, Clark ran water in her kitchen sink and bathtub and played records loudly; meanwhile, her husband and Djilas’s wife played cards.) Shortly after Djilas was arrested in November 1956, Clark smuggled the second half of his manuscript for The New Class, a critique of communism, out of Yugoslavia and arranged for it and his autobiography, Land Without Justice, to be published in the U.S. Shot through with vivid sketches of 1950s Belgrade, Budapest, and Warsaw; intimate details about Clark’s marriage, and genuine awe for her courage, this is a fitting tribute to a pioneering female journalist.