In Their Shoes: A White Woman's Journey Living as a Black, Navajo, and Mexican Illegal
by Grace Halsell

Probably no American journalist, man or woman, had a more extraordinary career than Grace Halsell. Before Lyndon Johnson personally hired her to work in the White House, Halsell had, over a period of two decades, written her way around the world—Europe, the Middle East, Africa, the Orient, and the Americas. This memoir chronicles that career. Born on the plains of West Texas, Halsell was encouraged by her pioneer father, who had led cattle drives on the Chisholm Trail, "to travel, to get the benefit" of knowing other peoples. She began her travels at the age of twenty, going first to Mexico and then touring the British Isles by bicycle. Halsell studied at the Sorbonne in Paris and lived in London, Tokyo, Berlin, and Seoul. In Hong Kong, where she lived on a fishing junk with a Chinese family of nineteen, she wrote a column for the Tiger Standard; in Tokyo, where she slept on tatami mats, ate raw fish, and took scalding ofuro baths, she was a columnist for the Japan Times. Moving to South America, she traveled on a tug for 2,000 miles down the Amazon and crossed the Andes by jeep. Halsell saw the Big Buddha, the Taj Mahal, the pyramids, and Machu Picchu. She interviewed presidents, movie stars, kings and prime ministers. Her dispatches for the New Herald Tribune, New York Post, and Christian Science Monitor datelined war zones in Korea, Vietnam, and Bosnia, as well as Russia, China, Macedonia, and Albania

The late GRACE HALSELL was the author of twelve books, including Soul Sister, in which she related her experiences living as a black in Mississippi and Harlem; Bessie Yellowhair, the story of her life on a Navajo reservation in Arizona and as a Navajo nursemaid in Los Angeles; and Journey to Jerusalem, a description of her life among Christians, Muslims, and Jews in Jerusalem.