Someone in our book group commented, "This makes me feel like I live such a boring life." Also, it makes me feel like I don't work nearly hard enough.

I remember my college roommate carrying this book around in the mid-1980s when she was taking flying lessons, and I was intrigued by it, but I have never read it. 25 years later, having seen Mombasa and Voi and the Rift Valley myself from the cockpit of a small plane, with a pilot's license in hand and several books about Africa behind me, having read just about every early aviator's autobiography and considering myself fairly knowledgeable on the subject of pioneering women pilots, it is UNBELIEVABLE that this is the first time I've read West with the Night. But it is.

And I love it. Not so much for the sharing of a fantastic childhood of a European girl spearing boar with Nandi tribesmen, or for the incredible descriptions of sky and sea and desert as seen from the air, but for the occasional crystallization of things I feel deeply myself. Like this:

'When you fly,' the young man said, 'you get a feeling of possession that you couldn't have if you owned all of Africa. You feel that everything you see belongs to you -- all the pieces are put together, and the whole is yours; not that you want it, but because, when you're alone in a plane, there's no one to share it. It's there and it's yours.'

There is so much left out of this book -- so many personal details, the messy background of Beryl Markham's life that we hunger for in a biography, which of her companions she was in love with and what happened to her mother and children (I personally found myself wondering furiously what the heck she was doing in 1942, in East Africa or in Europe or wherever she was, in addition to publishing this book). I longed for pictures, for talismans, for the face of the young Beryl to pore over. There's nothing here but the carefully measured portion she chooses to give us. And yet I feel that she's painted a wonderful portrait of herself, told us how she feels about the world and many more important things than names and dates.

It is very reminiscent of St. Exupéry, in philosophy and tone and style. I gather there is a rumor abroad that he may have helped her write it. I'm choosing to believe she wrote it herself. I mean, come on, guys. She flew the Atlantic herself.

-------------------------------

Best random adage, alleged quotation from Bror Blixen: "Life is life and fun is fun, but it's all so quiet when the goldfish die."

This book was a good read, and a good companion to Out of Africa. However, two things struck me as strange with this work. #1 I felt much as I did with Out of Africa that the author really wasn't telling me the entire story, and #2, I kept having to remind myself that the main character was a woman as, while eloquently written, it didn't seem I was reading a feminine perspective.

So.... as I did with Out of Africa, I checked out a biography and (thankfully) got a good one, Errol Trzebinski's "The Lives of Beryl Markham". Although long (and somewhat depressing given Beryl's licentious living), this book clarified Beryl's male orientation and shed light on the controversy surrounding West with the Night's authorship by Beryl Markham's third husband, the ghost writer Raoul Schumacher. If you want it all, read both. If you want just the stories of Africa, read West with the Night with a grain of salt.

The Lives of Beryl Markham, Trzebinski, 1995
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

For more on complicated women in beautiful Africa, see
Out of Africa, Dineson, 1937
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

Remarkable! Even Ernest Hemingway (who was not necessarily prone to handing out praise to fellow writers) gave it very high praise, saying "it is really a bloody wonderful book". I can see why he likes it -- in a way, she writes like he does, in a straightforward manner that is so descriptive, yet tightly told. This is easily 5-stars & if you haven't already read it, I highly recommend doing so. My friend has listened to the audiobook of West with the Night a couple of times & highly recommends it too.

This is a fine read for the heroine and her adventurous life, and in general I do appreciate her style and the choice of internal depth throughout. Let me say as much at the start.

I must say that about half way through I began to have mixed feelings, like Jeanette, about the style, especially about the long elegiac passages that often worked but sometimes did not, at least not for me. I was not hampered then by the feeling of what happens next, quite the contrary, but rather by the creeping overload of constant, predictable enigmas she throws out. Don't get me wrong, I do appreciate them, when they work, and many many do. True gems to fit the magnificent subjects, but others just sit there. I may be a lazy reader, but in fact I tend to relish these language devices.

The ones that are added in for fun did catch me, even to ones like the following for a passing situation, such as the Hindi telegraph operators tapping and listening without stop: "I have no idea what they really talked about. Possibly I do the Babus an injustice, but I think at best they used to read the novels of Anthony Trollope to each other over the wire. The Babu at Makindu reeled off an impressive lot of dots and dashes before he looked up from his table" to answer her request for a message. The metaphorical smile in the verbs here, the dramatic moment for her, the timing are all perfect for the effect of this moment and the role of the telegraph. She does this with a lot of characters, even major ones like Arab Ruta, and I appreciated all, well not all. Got tired of the boasting drinking machos, but only at times.

Oh yes, then the description of Balmy's special tick can't be ignored: "She was a little like the eccentric genius who, after being asked by his host why he had rubbed broccoli in his hair at dinner, apologized with a bow from the waist and said he had thought it was spinach." There are many such, as said, to the point where one feels privy to the energy in those long half drunken days out with gin or whatever in camp, on verandas, in the clubs, where she was clearly one of the ''boys'' in that African corner of the Empire. All in all, these deserve an extra star above, which I may add in time if this book ''stays'' with me long.

In contrast, when at the beginning I sensed the poetry in the passages like the next one, they began to wear thin with use and became flatter, and not just because the last wide landscapes she does this with is the dessert flying north to England. She is much shorter over the Atlantic at the end, concentrating on herself and the plane, so it read well. But there were many before then, and I grew weary enough with them to skip over, for the most part. The back cover's photograph of the nose dive at the end of that flight was perfect. Now to the example:
"In a sense it was formless. When the low stars shone over it and the moon clothed it in silver fog, it was the way the firmament must have been when the waters had gone and the night of the Fifth Day had fallen on creatures still bewildered by the wonder of their being. It was an empty world because no man had yet joined sticks to make a house or scratched the earth to make a road or embedded the transient symbols of his artifice in the clean horizon. But it was not a sterile world. It held the genesis of life and lay deep and anticipant under the sky."

ليسَ لأنّي تشرّفتُ بترجمته، ولكن! لا أخالُني قرأتُ كِتابَ سيرةٍ أجمل ولا أمتع من هذا الكِتاب. هذا الكِتابُ كَنزٌ منسيّ. وأتمنّى أن يسعَدَ بهِ القرّاء العرب جميعًا.

(4.5) I’ve meant to pick this up ever since I read Paula McLain’s fantastic novel about Beryl Markham, Circling the Sun. I loved Markham’s memoir even more. She writes so vividly about the many adventures of her life in Africa: hunting lions, training race horses, and becoming one of the continent’s first freelance pilots, delivering mail and locating elephant herds.

It took me a while to get used to the structure – this is a set of discrete stories rather than a chronological narrative – but whether she’s reflecting on the many faces of Africa or the peculiar solitude of night flights, the prose is just stellar. Ernest Hemingway once asserted in a letter that Markham could “write rings around all of us who consider ourselves as writers,” and I certainly enjoyed this more than anything I’ve read by Hemingway.

The text is bookended by two momentous flights: it opens with Markham scrambling to deliver oxygen to an injured miner, and ends with her completing the first east–west solo flight across the Atlantic in 1936. Her engine cut out multiple times; it’s no less than a miracle that she survived to crash land in Nova Scotia. Markham’s life is so exciting it’s crying out for a movie version. In the meantime, I’d like to read some more about her circle – Denys Finch Hatton; and Baron von Blixen and his wife Karen (aka Danish writer Isak Dinesen, famous for Out of Africa). In my Circling the Sun review for BookTrib, I wrote that “Markham was the kind of real-life action adventure heroine you expect to find in Indiana Jones movies,” and that sense was only confirmed by her own account.

Favorite passages:

“to fly in unbroken darkness without even the cold companionship of a pair of ear-phones or the knowledge that somewhere ahead are lights and life and a well-marked airport is something more than just lonely. It is at times unreal to the point where the existence of other people seems not even a reasonable possibility. The hills, the forests, the rocks, and the plains are one with the darkness, and the darkness is infinite. The earth is no more your planet than is a distant star—if a star is shining; the plane is your planet and you are its sole inhabitant.”

“I saw how a man can be master of a craft, and how a craft can be master of an element. I saw the alchemy of perspective reduce my world, and all my other life, to grains in a cup. I learned to watch, to put my trust in other hands than mine. And I learned to wander. I learned what every dreaming child needs to know—that no horizon is so far that you cannot get above it or beyond it.”

2014: Oh, I am so very tempted to read this one again....Shall I do another book about flying? Another book about Kenya? So soon? *sigh* I probably will give in to temptation because I loved this book beyond measure when I read it as a teenager and Hannah and Jeannette both confirmed my memory of how good it was.

2017: So, I did read it again and, as Ernest Hemingway said, "I wish you would get it and read it because it is really a bloody wonderful book." For one thing, unlike some of Hemingway's books [Sorry, Ernest], Markham's memoir is never dull.

She lived an extraordinary life, a life only possible at a certain moment in time, an African life. Markham's Africa

....is mystic; it is wild; it is a sweltering inferno; it is a photographer's paradise, a hunter's Valhalla, an escapist's Utopia. It is what you will, and it withstands all interpretations. It is the last vestige of a dead world or the cradle of a shiny new one. To a lot of people, as to myself it is just 'home'. It is all these things but one thing--it is never dull...

I have lifted my plane from the Nairobi airport for perhaps a thousand flights and I have never felt her wheels glide from the earth into the air without knowing the uncertainty and the exhilaration of firstborn adventure.

Beryl Markhan was African in a way that Karen Blixen (who wrote Out of Africa under the pen name Isak Dinesen) was not--and Markham's book is the better of the two for that reason alone. Markham was born in England but raised from the age of four on a farm in British East Africa at the edge of the Rift Valley. She ran wild and hunted as a child with the local tribesmen and her memories of those hunts provide some of the book's most vivid scenes.

The Equator runs close to the Rongai Valley, and, even at so high an altitude as this we hunted in, the belly of the earth was hot as live ash under our feet. Except for an occasional gust of fretful wind that flattened the high, corn-like grass, nothing uttered — nothing in the valley stirred. The chirrup-like drone of grasshoppers was dead, birds left the sky unmarked. the sun reigned and there were no aspirants to his place. We stopped by the red salt-lick that cropped out of the ground in the path of our trail.

I did not remember a time when the salt-lick was as deserted as this. Always before it had been crowded with grantii, impala, kongoni, eland, water-buck, and a dozen kinds of smaller animals. But it was empty today. It was like a marketplace whose flow and bustle of life you had witnessed ninety-nine times, but, on your hundredth visit, was vacant and still without even an urchin to tell you why.

I put my hand on Arab Maina’s arm. ‘What are you thinking, Maina? Why is there no game today?’ ‘Be quiet, Lakweit, and do not move.’ I dropped the butt of my spear on the earth and watched the two Murani stand still as trees, their nostrils distended, their ears alert to all things. Arab Kosky’s hand was tight on his spear like the claw of an eagle clasping a branch. ‘It is an odd sign,’ murmured Arab Maina, ‘when the salt-lick is without company!’

I had forgotten Buller, but the dog had not forgotten us. He had not forgotten that, with all the knowledge of the two Murani, he still knew better about such things. He thrust his body roughly between Arab Maina and myself, holding his black wet nose close to the ground. And the hairs along his spine stiffened. His hackles rose and he trembled. We might have spoken, but we didn’t. In his way Buller was more eloquent. Without a sound, he said, as clearly as it could be said — ‘Lion.”

Race is part of the story and the colonial experience, but unlike Blixen, Markham's intimacy with tribal hunters and Somali and Arab servants means that nothing in their ways seems strange to her. When the reality of colonialism intrudes she feels the growing gap with a poignant sense of loss.

What a child does not know and does not want to know of race and colour and class, he learns soon enough as he grows to see each man flipped inexorably into some predestined groove like a penny or a sovereign in a banker's rack. Kibii, the Nandi boy, was my good friend. Arab Ruta (the same boy grown to manhood), who sits before me, is my good friend, but the handclasp will be shorter, the smile will not be so eager on his lips, and though the path is for a while the same, he will walk behind me now, when once, in the simplicity of our nonage, we walked together.

British East Africa was a place where eccentrics gathered. Markham knew most of the colony's colorful and often crazy luminaries and they come to life here in a way that they do not in Blixen's book. [Sorry, I know I'm making a lot of comparisons here but I read both back to back and West with the Night is so much better I simply have to.]

Markham was friends with Karen Blixen and her husband. This is Karen at the time she was living on the famous farm in the Ngong hills:



Markham doesn't write much about Karen Blixen and perhaps she had an affair with the Baron. Markham seems to have had more than a few affairs and married three times, but if you are looking for dishy gossip there is none in either West with the Night or Out of Africa.



On Baron von Blixen: "Six feet of amiable Swede and, to my knowledge, the toughest, most durable White Hunter ever to snicker at the fanfare of safari or to shoot a charging buffalo between the eyes while debating whether his sundown drink will be gin or whisky.”

Pilot and big-game hunter Denys Finch Hatton was another of her intimates, and he and RAF veteran and bush pilot Tom Campbell Black encouraged Markham in her new career running an air taxi service in the uncharted African back country. This is Hatton with his beloved biplane:



But before there were airplanes in Markham's life, there were horses. Beryl, like her father, raised and trained race horses.



One of those horses has as vivid a personality as any of the humans and the story of this brave little mare running her heart out is perhaps the most exciting and touching description a horse race ever written.

If you love horses, flying adventures, Africa or just beautifully crafted prose don't miss this "bloody wonderful book."

I loved this book the first time around. This time I am listening to it with Simon. I was looking for inspiration and came across this title in Overdrive through our Public Library. Instantly, I knew this was the right choice. One of our favorite movies is, "Out of Africa" and one of Simon's heroes is Amelia Earhart. So, a book that combines aviation and Africa seems just the ticket.

Update 5/31/2020: This evening, while rummaging in my kitchen drawers, I found my note of two quotes that had grabbed my attention and caused me to lean in as we listened:

"No map I have flown by has ever been lost or thrown away; I have a trunk containing continents. I have the maps I always used en route to England and back."

"We sit together through the evening and discuss the things that each has saved for the other to hear."

So many thoughts flashed through my mind. Would my strength hold out long enough to save Buller from the tusks of the boar? What had become of Arab Maina, and why had I ever left him? How would poor Kosky get home? Would he bleed too badly on the way?

I ran on and on, following the barely audible bark of Buller, and the few drops of blood clinging at intervals to the stalks of grass or soaking into the absorbent earth. It was either Buller's blood or the warthog's. Most likely it was both.

"Ah-yey, if I could only run a little faster!"

I must not stop for a minute. My muscles begin to ache, my legs bleed from the 'wait-a-bit' thorns and the blades of elephant grass. My hand, wet with perspiration, slips on the handle of my spear. I stumble, recover, and run on as the sound of Buller's bark grows louder, closer, then fades again.

The sun is going and shadows lay like broad hurdles across my path. Nothing is of any importance to me except my dog. The boar is not retreating; he is leading Buller away from me, away from my help.

The blood spoor grows thicker and there is more of it. Buller's bark is weak and irregular, but a little nearer. There are trees now jutting from the plain, large, solitary, and silent.

The barking stops and there is nothing but blood to follow. How can there be so much blood? Breathless and running still, I peer ahead into the changing light and see something move in a patch of turf under a flat-topped thorn tree.

I stop and wait. It moves again and takes colour - black and white and splattered with red. It is silent, but it moves. It is Buller.

I need neither breath nor muscles to cover the few hundred yards to the thorn tree. I am suddenly there, under its branches, standing in a welter of blood. The warthog, as large as any I have ever seen, six times as large as Buller, sits exhausted on his haunches while the dog rips at its belly.

The old boar sees me, another enemy, and charges once more with magnificent courage, and I sidestep and plunge my spear to his heart. He falls forward, scraping the earth with his great tusks, and lies still. I leave the spear in his body, turn to Buller, and feel tears starting to my eyes.

The dog is torn open like a slaughtered sheep. His right side is a valley of exposed flesh from the root of his tail to his head, and his ribs show almost white, like the fingers of a hand smeared with blood. He looks at the warthog, then at me beside him on my knees, and lets his head fall into my arms. He needs water, but there is no water anywhere, not within miles.

"Ah-yey! Buller, my poor, foolish Buller!"

He licks my hand, and I think he knows I can do nothing, but forgives me for it. I cannot leave him because the light is almost gone now and there are leopards that prowl at night, and hyenas that attack only the wounded and helpless.

"If only he lives through the night! If only he lives through the night!"

There is a hyena on a near hill who laughs at that, but it is a coward's laugh. I sit with Buller and the dead boar under the thorn tree and watch the dark come closer.

The world grows bigger as the light leaves it. There are no boundaries and no landmarks. The trees and the rocks and the anthills begin to disappear, one by one, whisked away under the magical cloak of evening, I stroke the dog's head and try to close my eyes, but of course I cannot. Something moves in the tall grass, making a sound like a woman's skirt. The dog stirs feebly and the hyena on the hill laughs again.

I let Buller's head rest on the turf, stand up, and pull my spear from the body of the boar. Somewhere to the left there is a sound, but I do not recognize it and I can see only dim shapes that are motionless.

I lean for a moment on my spear peering outward at what is nothing, and then turn toward my thorn tree. 97

Brilliant and absorbing book by Markham. She was an amazing adventurer - and moreover, she is an exquisite and evocative writer. She has a beautiful writing style.

Sometimes I had to read sentences of hers a few times over - not because they were confusing or tiresome, but because they were so rich and layered with various meanings.

Markham explores her African childhood. Being raised by her single father on a farm in Kenya. She's a scrappy little girl, as you can imagine. She hunts with the local boys. She tames horses. She gets 'moderately eaten by a lion.' Such adventures!

She grows up to become a horse trainer, and an aviatrix. She was the first person to fly solo across the Atlantic.

BOOKS THIS MIGHT REMIND YOU OF:
Anything by Alexandra Fuller.
Out of Africa.

Because Markham lives in Africa, and away from 'respectable European society,' she has unimaginable freedom. There's very little squawking about what women can and cannot do, should and should not do. She can fly a plane. Therefore she is on-call 24/7 to come out and perform various rescues. No one has time to complain about her lack of a penis when people are routinely dying in remote places.

Her life is very exciting and amazing. She only talks about her adventures - nothing about her slew of lovers, her husbands, or her son. She keeps her private life private. This about lions, boars, dogs, racehorses, flying a plane, sitting with the dying, and earning her living. If you want to know more about her personal life, read The Lives of Beryl Markham by Errol Trzebinski.


The only warnings I would put on this book are general feelings of imperialist white people towards black people and violence with, by or involving animals. It's animal violence that comes from living in Kenya, taking people on safari, raising horses, taking a dog on a hunt etc. etc. Not something like animal experimentation or anything. None of these things bothered me, the sweeping 1942 adventure-style of the book is something that transports you to another era that is full of sand and gin. But you can come to whatever conclusions you want to, everyone reads a book differently.

TL;DR Exciting, riveting, beautifully written. Transports you to another time and place. Highly recommended reading.

Beautiful book with brilliant writing.

I'm currently reading some books off of the Armed Services Edition list from World War 2 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armed_S...) and when I saw how much my Goodreads friend Sonny enjoyed this one from the list, I decided to give it a try.

Markham tells of her upbringing in Africa, hunting with natives, training race horses, learning to fly a plane, and eventually piloting the first east to west trans-Atlantic flight. She manages to do all this in a way that is both completely confident and not at all arrogant. I can't explain to you how good the writing is. It's like you are right there with her as the elephant is about to charge, and the carburetor on the plane starts to choke, and the leopard jumps in the bedroom and grabs her dog. But she tells it in such a smooth way that you feel like you weren't just there, but that you went through it with her. I think. I'm still not sure how to describe the writing. But it will be a long time before I forget Buller, or the cast-off zebra, or the chapter written from the perspective of the horse.

This book was written in 1942 but became a runaway success when it was reprinted in the 1980s. In 1987 the actress Julie Harris recorded the audio version I listened to and it is MASTERFUL. I don't think I've ever heard an audiobook performance as good. She hits all the right spots with just the right emotion and feeling. And the craziest part is that you can tell that she's literally just reading the book! She pauses to turn pages, you can hear the pages turning, you can even occasionally hear traffic in the background outside whatever room she's sitting in. Somehow this made it all even better, as if Harris was just sitting next to me reading the book. Amazing.

So when Wrack and Wise Child are in the final stretch of the Kenyan Derby and I literally have to pull my car over into a parking lot to finish listening because I'm physically tense about the outcome, I don't know if it's because of how well it was written or how well it was read, but I honestly feel like it's both.

"Africa was the breath and life of my childhood. It is still the host of all my darkest fears, the cradle of mysteries always intriguing, but never wholly solved. It is the remembrance of sunlight and green hills, cool water and the yellow warmth of bright mornings. It is as ruthless as any sea, more uncompromising than its own deserts. It is without temperance in its harshness or in its favours. It yields nothing, offering much to men of all races."

I cannot help but liken this alluring memoir to a love story – a romance of sorts between Beryl Markham and Africa – its landscape, its people, its dangers and its wonders. Probably like most readers, I’d first learned of Markham from Paula McLain’s fictional work, Circling the Sun. I was so inspired by her character in that one, that I knew I’d have to read this one someday. I have to admit, I put it off for nearly four years. I wasn’t quite sure it would measure up to my expectations. I mean, Markham was an adventuress – a wild child, a horse trainer, a pilot. How could she possibly write an engaging memoir? Well, she did that and more. Not only did the descriptions of her life and of Africa hold me spellbound, I was completely intoxicated by the beautiful prose.

She spoke of her childhood living on her father’s farm in Njoro in what is now known as Kenya. She learned to hunt with the Nandi boys and men. She kept a trusty dog, Buller, by her side. He was there through thick and thin. I had to gasp at many of the perilous encounters and close calls she narrates! Elephants, horses, birds, warthogs and lions – she speaks of all creatures with such eloquence.

"The distant roar of a waking lion rolls against the stillness of the night, and we listen. It is the voice of Africa bringing memories that do not exist in our minds or in our hearts — perhaps not even in our blood. It is out of time, but it is there, and it spans a chasm whose other side we cannot see."

I’ve been on a horse only on rare occasions, but Markham’s admiration for this noble creature is contagious. She strikes out on her own to train race-horses after her father’s farm fails and he quits Africa for Peru. What courage this young woman must have had to gallop away on her Pegasus from all she’d known since the age of four, to a place where she must start anew. It is while living in Molo that she will later embrace a new passion – flying.

"The dooryard of Nairobi falls into the Athi Plains. One night I stood there and watched an aeroplane invade the stronghold of the stars. It flew high; it blotted some of them out; it trembled their flames like a hand swept over a company of candles."

Thus began a new love affair with the airplane. Speaking of love affairs, you will not glean much from this memoir. While Markham may mention these men, often with fondness, we don’t really get any juicy tidbits in that department. You’ll have to look elsewhere for that gossip. You can assume from her writing and from a little research that Tom Black was one of these lovers, however. Under the training of Tom Black, Markham earned her ‘B’ license, allowing her to make a career of her latest obsession. I was amazed at all she accomplished. Apparently, she was the only female pilot in Africa at the time, from aiding safaris to making medical emergency runs, and everything in between. Eventually she became the first person to ever cross the Atlantic Ocean solo from west to east, thus the title of this memoir.

What a tremendous life she led! I’ll admit that there are naturally portions of her story that she did not touch on. I could not deem her perfect, yet my admiration for her joy for living and risk-taking is quite genuine. I’d recommend this memoir to anyone that loves gorgeous writing, Africa, and strong, daring women. Beryl Markham will teach you to make the very most out of your dreams and opportunities!

"I learned what every dreaming child needs to know — that no horizon is so far that you cannot get above it or beyond it."

n  It was a tragedy with too petty a plot to encourage talk, too little irony to invite reflection...And, if this is so, then those who pause before these otherwise unmeaning trifles may consider that they speak a moral — not profound, but worthy of a thought; Death will have his moment of respect, however he comes along, and no matter upon what living thing he lays his hand.
African tragedy — melancholy trivia. What's in a point of view?n

4.5/5

This may very well end up being a five star; perhaps, even a favorite. It would certainly have been had I read it a mere three to give years ago, but my wariness, while while complicating of late, is still enough to irritate me over wild suppositions and supercilious metaphors drawn by white hands and white tongues out of the mystical mumbo jumbo that is their conception of Africa and its 5000 mile latitudinal span, and Markham, while far, far better than most, is still prone to such nonsense at times. However, those true inhabitants of humanity's origin have for the most part names, and faces, and lives beyond her own, and what a life of her own she had, and how wonderfully she writes of both it and them. I may cave in later on in the newness of the year, especially if my tastes and motivations lead me along less fortuitous reads, but for now, I stand my ground. Sentimental indulgence only helps it if humanizes, and it would not do well to lift something too high should it not triumph enough over its limitations.

n  Anybody kicked as far down the ladder as she's been kicked isn't obliged to tell the truth, but I think she told some of it. Anyway, you can't expect gospel for a few pounds.n

I went into this work with various hearsays of beauty (obtusely confirmed in Markham's case by my edition's cover and less so by the text itself), flight (the photo on the back proclaims this well enough), and praise from Hemingway of all people, which may incentivize some but usually sends me in the opposite direction. The casual accusations of "she didn't really write it" float around (cis men again conflating the ability to wield a pen, physical or metaphorical in these days of the holographic keyboard, with having a dick), and now that I'm finished, I can see why such odious jealousy still clutches at its shared ball sack. What struck me most was the plain, almost honest (how slippery and nonsensically defined a word when it comes to narrative tone) a tone Markham's words have, which related borderline fantastic stories and carried those accompanying her forward to a veritable place in history instead of committing the usual use, abuse, and discard routine white colonialists have done and continue to do the world over. She is awfully complacent about "civilizing" and all the artificiality of racial categories, and the writing is better when she is less grandiloquent and more concerned with people, action, and the successes and failures that accompany such mortal entities, whether on land or on high. In the end, if one had to read a book written by a white person about any section of Africa and Gordimer were not available, Markham would do, especially for the young girl looking to grow on histories less hemmed in and erased. What harm that came would inevitably have to be unpacked later on, but if her parents were wise enough, it would be well worth the risk.

I will admit, this was a welcome surprise so early in the year. Even with my balancing of certain personal ordinances, it was rather startling how easily I was swept away at certain points, such as any of the chapters that had to do with horses, or the warmth of a reunion, or the final heart jerking moment of a record breaking flight. This, modified, would make for a good movie it it kept Markham's humanization and went further in it than she did at points, rather than churn out yet another white savior trash heap at the expense of a content fully capable of swallowing every so termed white country out there and then some. All in all, a complicated experience, but one well worth having. I can only hope Markham is read by others who are willing to put in the work for the sake of wresting humanity from the written word, work that is always in progress.

n  What a child does not know and does not know to know of race and colour and class, [they] learn[] soon enough as [they] grow[] to see each [person] flipped inexorably into some predestined groove like a penny or a sovereign in a banker's rank. Kibii, the Nandi boy, was my good friend. Arab Ruta, who sits before me, is my good friend, but the handclasp will be shorter, the smile will not be so eager on his lips, and though the path is for a while the same, he will walk behind me now, when once, in the simplicity of our nonage, we walked together.
No, my friend, I have not learned more than this. Nor in all these years have I met many who have learned as much.n