West with the Night | Beryl Markham

book: West with the Night | Beryl Markham

books:

West with the Night

	West with the Night Beryl Markham Blackstone Audio Inc., 2007 average customer review:based on 1 review view larger image
	for more information click here

In this beautifully written autobiography, Beryl Markham describes how at seventeen, when her father lost their farm and went to Peru, she chose to stay in Africa and began a highly successful career as a racehorse trainer. In her twenties, she gave up horses and started flying airplanes, becoming the first woman in East Africa to be granted a commercial pilot's license and becoming the first woman to fly the Atlantic from east to west.

Pure Poetry

This forgotten volume is a beautifully written memoir of Markum's time in Africa in the early 1900s. The writing (some have questioned whether husband Raoul Schumacher was actually the author, or at least collaborator) is vividly descriptive and reads like lyric poetry. Hemingway wrote to a friend that "...she has written so well, and marvelously well, that I was completely ashamed of myself as a writer.....She can write rings around all of us who consider ourselves writers."
Consider this passage from an eloquent retelling of a safari hunt that left one man dead when a fatally wounded lion turned on its hunters as they snapped photographs: "Cremation is a smooth word that seeks to conceal the indelicate reality of a human body being baked in fire.....In mid-afternoon on the African veldt under a harsh and revealing sun, it is at best a euphemism. Still, since men cherish the paradox requiring that to insure immortality they must preserve what is most mortal about them, wood was gathered and a fire was built." The whole account, in just four pages, captures the tragedy of it all--animal and human.
Beryl Markum, the first person to fly solo across the Atlantic from east to west, was a contemporary (and perhaps romantic rival) of Karen Blixen (aka Isak Dinesen) author of the memoir Out of Africa.
I highly recommend the audio read by the late Kate Fleming (audio pseudonym: Anna Fields, one of the best audio readers ever and greatly missed).

for more information click here

products you might be interested in