West with the Night | Beryl Markham

West with the Night | Beryl Markham | Far far better than I anticipated. Great writing.

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West with the Night

	West with the Night Beryl Markham North Point Press, 1982 - 320 pages average customer review:based on 120 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

West with the Night is the story of Beryl Markham--aviator, racehorse trainer, beauty--and her life in the Kenya of the 1920s and '30s.

West with the Night

As a child growing up with her father in Africa, Beryl Markham faced down lions and wild boar. As an adult she trained race horses before learning to fly airplanes and becoming a bush pilot. Eventually she became the first pilot, female or male, to fly west with the night and cross the Atlantic ocean solo from Europe to North America. Markham brings the African bush to life with stories of boar hunts and elephant hunts. Of horse races and airplane flights over desert terrain. She lived a courageous life in a time when girls were only supposed to wear dresses and play with dolls and flying airplanes was a man's job. Highly inspirational to read!

There's so much to talk about in mother-daughter book clubs or any book club. How was Markham's life different from so many of the girls in her time? How would her life have been different if her mother was also in Africa raising her?

This book is beautifully written; I've read it three times and each reading I glean more and more from it. I highly recommend it for anyone in high school or older.

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Far far better than I anticipated. Great writing.

Absolutely captivating personal account of times and places long gone. As a fan of "Heat of the Sun," this book was a treasure.

Reads like fiction

I agree with Hemingway that this is a piece of high literature that reads like fiction and spreads itself before the reader like a well-produced film. It drove me to learn more about the author and her life.

West with the Night

I read this book because someone suggested my family might have been related to Beryl Markham, which is not the case, but...
What a woman - this is a true account of one of the first bush pilots in Africa, Beryl Markham, who was the first pilot to fly westward across the Atlantic from England. Although there is some dispute whether she actually wrote this autobiographical account (some say that her paramour, who edited the book, actually wrote it - she never confirmed or denied it), the stories are true and fascinating, encouraging the reader to learn more about her. The writing style is wonderful and interesting - no wonder Hemingway loved it. You wouldn't know this book was first published so many years ago.

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Beautifully written account of life in East Africa

My grandparents went to East Africa in the 1920s. My grandfather, a Scotsman, was looking for gold, my grandmother, a South African was looking for romance. My mother was born in the year this book opens.
When I was a child my mother regaled me with stories of scorpions, leopards amd pythons, and this book rekindled my memories of childhood.
It is a well-written account of a wild child's life in Kenya, hunting with the local people, being hunted by the local animals, and seeing the tribes as they were before tourism took over.

The author seems to take everything in her stride, and nothing seems to bother her. A bull elephant intent on killing her, flying blind over the Med, engine problems over Newfoundland, nothing seems to faze her.
I wasn't surprised to see that this book flopped on its original release in 1942 - it was an every day account of life as it was then.

But in 2008, things are very different and this is a very good account of early settler life in Kenya, White hunters and early aviation. I was sorry when I finished it, and wished it had been much much longer.

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