Helpful Score: 3
the most wonderful book I ever read! I love Africa, am a female private pilot and her words put other authors to shame. My husband, who seldom reads female authors, highly recommends this 5 star book to anyone who loves to read!
Helpful Score: 3
Beryl Markham writes beautifully, so well that it is like remembering something you had forgotten. She writes about Africa, horses and flying in a mostly non-technical way. It is filled with descriptive prose and philosophical musings. My favorite part: "No map I have flown with has ever been lost or thrown away. I have a trunk containing continents." I think her accounts are true, but at the end of the book you are not left a detailed timeline and an factual account of Africa as much as an impression of what Africa was like while she lived there. This is one of my favorite books.
Helpful Score: 3
This is perhaps my favorite book I've ever read. Plot-wise, it is the autobiography of a woman who grew up in East Africa in the early 20th century. It is marvelous -- the quote from Hemingway should sell it if we can't. There are some racist undertones that are probably appropriate for the time and place of this book, albeit shocking now.
Scholars debate whether this book was actually written by Hemingway himself. He was her lover, and so seldom praised other writers' works. Markham, after penning this masterpiece, never wrote anything else. The book does have a Hemingway flavor to it.
Scholars debate whether this book was actually written by Hemingway himself. He was her lover, and so seldom praised other writers' works. Markham, after penning this masterpiece, never wrote anything else. The book does have a Hemingway flavor to it.
Helpful Score: 2
This book was so lovely to read, it earned it's place on my shelf of "All-Time Favorite Books To Be Read Again and Again".
Ms. Markham is an excellent story-teller, at the same time self-effacing yet with a beautiful, poetic turn of phrase. Her remarkable adventures as a flyer in 1930's Africa are astounding.
Ms. Markham is an excellent story-teller, at the same time self-effacing yet with a beautiful, poetic turn of phrase. Her remarkable adventures as a flyer in 1930's Africa are astounding.
Helpful Score: 1
Ernest Hemingway himself praised this memoir as so well written: "She (Beryl Markham) can write rings around all of us who consider ourselves as writers." This is a stunning memoir of her life as an aviator in Africa. I thoroughly enjoyed it.
