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| Author: Beryl Markham |
This is about an extraordinary woman, a remarkable
writer, and a fascinating place. Markham was raised
by her father on a large farm in British East Africa
in the early twentieth century. As a child she preferred
spear hunting with the natives to going to school. At
seventeen, when her father lost their farm and went
to Peru, she chose to stay in Africa and began a successful
career as a race horse 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, then the first woman to fly the Atlantic
solo from east to west. This book is her autobiography
but it is also about Africa.
Originally published in 1942 and reissued in 1983,
this is much more than a story of aviation, revealing
a poet's feeling for the land, an adventurer's engagement
with life, and a philosopher's insights into the human
condition.
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Ernest Hemingway in a letter to Maxwell Perkins
"Did you read Beryl Markham's book, West with the Night?
I knew her fairly well in Africa and never would have suspected that she could
and would put pen to paper except to write in her flyer's log book. As it is,
she has written so well, and marvelously well, that I was completely ashamed
of myself as a writer. I felt that I was simply a carpenter with words, picking
up whatever was furnished on the job and nailing them together and sometimes
making an okay pig pen. But [she] can write rings around all of us who consider
ourselves writers. The only parts of it that I know about personally, on account
of having been there at the time and heard the other people's stories, are absolutely
true .... I wish you would get it and read it because it is really a bloody wonderful
book." |
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From Library Journal
Markham's West with the Night was originally published
in the early 1940s and disappeared, only to be rediscovered and reprinted
in the 1980s when it became a smash hit. This latest incarnation is a lavishly
illustrated edition (note: not this edition). Though Markham is
known for setting an aviation record for a solo flight across the Atlantic
from East to West-hence the title-she was also a bush pilot in Africa,
sharing adventures with Blor Blixen and Denys Finch-Hatton of Out
of Africa fame. Hemingway, who met Markham during his safari days,
dubbed the book "bloody wonderful." |
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$15.00 (softcover)
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