This is the story of a remarkable American who led a storybook life in the early 20th century. His name was Paxton Hibben (a distant relative of the author), who was raised in a well-to-do Midwestern family, earned degrees from Princeton and Harvard, and then set forth in 1905 to take on the world.
He began with seven years as a career diplomat, followed by a brief fling in politics, and then found his true vocation as a journalist, beginning as a war correspondent in World War I. Hibben was a romantic who thrived on adventure and intrigue and seemed to find both wherever he went. He also became a political radical, at a time when this was distinctly unpopular.
His crowning achievement was the humanitarian effort he organized to rescue starving children during the terrible Russian famine of 1921-23. This cost him dearly among his countrymen, most of whom had turned their backs on the Soviet Union and its starving citizens. The Russians were puzzled by this "astonishing American," but were deeply grateful to him, and honored him in his final adventure, a hero's burial in Moscow.
Because his widow destroyed all records, a biography of Paxton Hibben was a challenge for the author. Paxton had been a black sheep of the family, and all who knew him personally were also deceased. It took Stuart Hibben more than fifteen years to piece together this account of his distant relative's extraordinary life as career diplomat, politician, war correspondent, and philanthropist.
