Uncle Ken gave me West with the Night to read on one of my many book-foraging visits to his home library. Originally published in 1942, one of the things that continues to capture my imagination about West with the Night is what Ernest Hemingway wrote about it 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."
Aside from that, the story is Markham's account of being a bush pilot in Africa in the 1930's. She is a remarkable and brave woman in a time that women were not piloting planes around Africa; in fact, very few people were doing it at all. I like the writing style very much, aside from the sometimes not-so-enlightened race references that date the work and offend me somewhat. But it was good, too, to read the descriptions and the stories of Africa--both its landscape and its people--from her unique vantage points in the air as well as on the ground.
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