The Memoirs of Herbert Hoover--a Surprising Find!

The only bare mention of Herbert Hoover at all in most surveys of American history is to connect and most often blame him for the Great Depression. But, oh, how disappointing those references are to what has to have been a truly great and generous man.
Great, maybe, you might buy, understanding how that word could be applied to almost any president. Yet, “generous,” you wonder, now what in the world could that mean?
That means that after Herbert Hoover began his public service at the beginning of World War I, he never took a salary and even paid his own expenses. He paid his own way, his own way in everything thing he did. His public service included work on the Belgium Relief Commission, as the US Food Administator during World War I, helping President Woodrow Wilson negotiate the agreement to end World War I, as secretary of commerce for Warren G. Harding, in President Calvin Coolidge's cabinet and, finally, as president.
How could he do that? No, he was not a Roosevelt or Rockefeller.
His is another one of those only in America stories, in that he became orphaned at an early age to be shuffled off to grow up as a charge of relatives.
From there he entered and was graduated from Stanford University, and from there became a mining engineer that sent him all over the world and made him a very, very wealthy man.
There was a lot more to Herbert Hoover than money and politics, however. He had more adventures than Indiana Jones, real adventures that took him all over the world. Read them, and you have to find them amazing and more interesting than anything you'd see in many movies or read in your typical novel.
His adventures, are told in one of the three volumes of his memoirs entitled, “Years of Adventures.”
For example, he crawled into a cave in Burma looking for mineral riches only to be turned back by the very large and fresh paw print of a tiger on the cave's sandy floor. He served as a mining engineer in China with the job of identifying all of that vast country’s mineral wealth. Alas, the most valuable such commodity he could identify was coal. The rest, whatever there might have been, had long been gouged out of Chinese soil over thousands of years.
That Chinese adventure also landed him behind the protective walls of a hurriedly built fortification erected to prevent Chinese in the Boxer Rebellion of 1900 from murdering Hoover and other foreigners in a Chinese city. His description of that adventure alone could make an entire movie. And the song, "There'll be a Hot Time in the Old Town Tonight," existed even then because Hoover recounts how a US Marine Corps band arriving to save the foreingers played that tune.
But, that was just a minor episode in Hoover's life adventures. There was his work to get Americans stranded in Europe at the beginning of World War I home, his work on the Belgium Relief Commission to make certain the people of Belgium and France were fed during the world. And, then...
You could say "and, then..." a lot because his adventures seemed to go on forever and in places that we can only dream of today.
Read his memoirs, and I can assure you will be entertained and impressed by Herbert Hoover. You can't help it.