Edith Iglauer has been a journalist for four decades, working for The New Yorker, Harper's, The Atlantic Monthly and other publications. This book is a lively retrospective of her writings, from the 1940s when she covered Eleanor Roosevelt's press conferences, through the 1960s when she was present at the founding of Canada's first Inuit co-operative society, through the 1970s and 1980s when she fell in love with a west coast Canadian fishermen and made her new home in his part of the world.

The collection is a tribute to an internationally respected journalist who approaches each new subject, a "stranger next door," with intelligence, humour and a rampant curiosity.