I feel honoured and privileged to have had the opportunity to read this remarkable memoir. Beryl Markham’s story is outstanding enough by itself. What makes this memoir even more spectacular is the writing. On the cover is a quote from Ernest Hemingway: “[Markham] can write rings around all of us who consider ourselves as writers . . . It really is a bloody wonderful book.”

Never mind that when he wrote his comments in a letter to a friend the ellipsis contained some typically misogynistic and foul references to Beryl Markham as a woman, the bare fact of his accolade is perhaps even more powerful because of it, wrung out of his wrinkled heart through a mangle stronger than his bias.

Under the authentic and authoritative voice of Ms Markham’s prose, Africa in all its splendor and terror came alive for me in a way that set me down into its myriad contrasts and changes and variances both heart and soul. I can’t think of a way I could possibly read this book without feeling completely that I was there and witnessing it all at first hand – living it myself.

This memoir is now historical, of course, and as happens with much of history there was no such thing as political correctness. Even though there was one aspect involving Ms Markham’s flying career that is now so obviously illegal, back then it wasn’t; and I am certainly not about to flog the flyers of the day for actions taken in a context where it was normal and even desirable n  at the timen.

There were times while reading this novel that I was moved to tears; there were even more times where I was enraptured by sheer, undiluted wonder. Ms Markham arrived in Africa when she was 4 years old, and as she grew up, some of her oldest friends were the African children she played with and learned from and even went hunting with. She accomplished more adult feats in her first few years of life in Africa than most people could claim in a lifetime. The sense of wonder doesn’t end there, for this woman led an astonishing life of adventure and achievement unparalleled at the time – and possibly for all time.

This story is one of the best, most absorbing reads I have had the good fortune to encounter. This is a book to be experienced and savoured.

Some food for thought:

“Nairobi has a frontier cut to its clothes and wears a broad-brimmed hat, but it tends an English garden; it nurtures the shoots of custom grafted from the old tree. It dresses for dinner, passes its port-wine clockwise, and loves a horse-race.”

“I could never tell where inspiration begins and impulse leaves off. I suppose the answer is in the outcome. If your hunch proves a good one, you are inspired; if it proves bad, you are guilty of yielding to thoughtless impulse.”

“And his were solemn dreams. They were solemn dreams and in time he made them live. Tom Black is not a name that ever groped for glory in a headline or shouldered other names aside for space to strut in. It can be found in the drier lists of men who figured flights in terms of hours or days, instead of column inches.”

“If a man has any greatness in him, it comes to light, not in one flamboyant hour, but in the ledger of his daily work.” Tom Black was her flying teacher, her mentor and her friend right through until his death.

“I am incapable of a profound remark on the workings of destiny. It seems to get up early and then go to bed very late, and it acts most generously toward the people who nudge it off the road whenever they meet it.”

“A word grows to a thought – a thought to an idea – an idea to an act. The change is slow, and the Present is a sluggish traveller loafing in the path Tomorrow wants to take.”

A beautifully written and poetic book. It captures the heart of a slice of Africa in the 1920's and 30's. Worth reading for the prose alone, and to get a sense of what Africa was like. It was horse racing, old cars, old airplane adventures, and hunting. This quote was a good summary:

"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 read this while in Kenya, and it really brought it to life. There is a bit of ancientness in Africa that is innate, inside us, that can be brought out even now. Such as when we heard lions roar, it does something to your insides that makes you uneasy in a way you can't explain.

"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."

My grandfather and father were both hunters, and I think there is something romantic about what hunting in Africa must have been like. But also the amount of risk (health-wise) and cost it must have taken to be an elephant hunter (let alone what we now know it did to the population) seems crazy.

"The essence of elephant-hunting is discomfort in such lavish proportions that only the wealthy can afford it.">

But what I really most loved about this book was the vivid pictures you got from her prose. I'll end with one of my favorites:

"Somewhere an ancient automobile engine roared into life, its worn pistons and bearings hammering like drumbeats. Hot night wind stalked through the thorn trees and leleshwa that surrounded the clearing. It bore the odour of swampland, the smell of Lake Victoria, the breath of weeds and sultry plains and tangled bush. It whipped at the oil flares and snatched at the surfaces of the Avian. But there was loneliness in it and aimlessness, as if its passing were only a sterile duty lacking even the beneficent promise of rain."

Beryl Markham led an extraordinary life. As a child she grew up in Africa on her father's horse race farm. From him she learned to breed and race horses. She stayed in Africa after her father left for Peru and continued the business at the age of seventeen.

Later she became a pilot, an unusual occupation for anyone, much less a woman in the 1930s. She may be best known for flying solo non stop across the Atlantic to North America from England, even though her plane, due to fuel freezing crash landed.

While quite the elite bohemian in her youth, she eventually became poor and was living in Africa alone and obscure in her 80s.

She was rediscovered in the 1980s when George Gutekunst, a wealthy restaurateur, happened across some letters by Ernest Hemingway. Hemingway wrote,

"Did you read Beryl Markham's book, West with the Night? ...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 this girl, who is to my knowledge very unpleasant and we might even say a high-grade b--, can write rings around all of us who consider ourselves as writers ... it really is a bloody wonderful book."

Gutekunst got Markham's book reissued. He discovered Markham in Kenya where she was still training thoroughbreds. The republishing of her book allowed her to end her years in relative comfort.

I got the above from online sources. The book, originally published in 1942, deals only with Markham's life in Africa, horse training and flying.

I don't know if I agree with Hemingway's assessment of Markham's writing, but the content of her book is certainly interesting.

We learn a lot about Africa, the bush, hunting, her relationship with the native Kenyans and her entanglements on more than one occasion, with wild lions.

She deftly describes her life so that one can see all that she saw in vivid terms.

She creates a graphic, if terrifying, even if it is vicarious experience for the reader as she describes the mechanics of the plane as well as her own feelings, as she flies. Especially when she flies across the Atlantic. Her courage is pretty amazing. What an unusual woman.

She had many friends then. She mentions no love affairs, although other sources say she had quite a few. She rubbed shoulders with the rich and famous and slept with more than a few of them.

I'd like to know how she became poor and unknown. What happened in her life where she seemed to have lost all her friends and lovers? Did she grow too old? Or as they died off, she became more reclusive?

I suppose a good biography will answer these questions.

If you enjoy non fiction adventure. I'd say this book is for you.

Normally a work of fiction usually wins it for me, with the exception of West With the Night, an autobiography by Beryl Markham, the first woman to fly the Atlantic from east to west. Written in her own style, which was excellent prose to me....she makes Africa come alive with her language and sense of Africa. Most of the book was about her flying career, with a portion about her childhood and growing up in Africa...which by no stretch of the imagination was it a normal one. Two quotes that I loved in her book: "A word grows to a thought - a thought to an idea - an idea to an act. The change is slow, and the Present is a sluggish traveller loafing in the path Tomorrow wants to take." "You can live a lifetime and, at the end of it, know more about other people than you know about yourself. You learn to watch other people, but you never watch yourself because you strive against loneliness. If you read a book, or shuffle a deck of cards, or care for a dog, you are avoiding yourself. The abhorrence of loneliness is as natual as wanting to live at all. If it were otherwise, men would never have bothered to make an alphabet, nor to have fashioned words out of what were only animal sounds, not to have crossed continents - each man to see what the other looked like. Just an example of her writing, I highly recommend this book....loved it!

Beryl Markham is someone who you would want to meet and study, I think. This story is nuts, but at the same time, it lacks the pull of human relationships that generally carry me through a story. People obviously read for different reasons, but for me it is relationships that pull me through a story – not necessarily romantic relationships, you understand, but the way people interact. Will they be friends? Will they fall in love? Will they betray each other? There is none of that in this book, so it is not an obvious fit for me as a reader in that way. It is, however, about a badass woman, who was the first person to fly solo across the Atlantic from east to west.

For the most part, people have such interesting lives. I mean, even a person who lives the most normal, or the most domestic, life ever has some kind of story, something to say about life, something about betrayal or compassion or just what it means to be a human. And then there are people like Beryl Markham, who are like, Oh hai, did I ever tell you about the time I almost got eaten by a lion? !!! ???? Whaaa? That is very exotic to me. And then there was that time where she went hunting boar with her buddies, who were Maasai warriors. Oh, and that other time where she saved everybody from floods and killer ants and killer elephants using just her wits and tiny airplanes. So, despite the general absence of human relationships in this book, it’s just an inherently interesting story.

Hemingway was a fan of this book, and it is always interesting to me to read the writers he admired. With Hemingway, I always get this feeling that every sentence is seething with emotion just underneath the surface of what it says, and he’s stuffed that emotion down and tried to nail the sentence shut, but the emotion seeps through the cracks. But, the authors he loves always seem to actually be apathetic. Maybe I’m generalizing too much, but that’s how it seems to me from A Moveable Feast. I think this book is a good example of that. I hadn’t thought about it before, but it seems like it is entirely different to write a memoir where you treat your own story objectively and have compassion for your enemies, and another thing to be generally apathetic. And you don’t get the sense that a woman who flew across the Atlantic, before it was really the thing to do, would have been very apathetic. But, that is what I feel from the writing. Ambition, yes; competitive spirit, yes; but, passion? Not really. It is interesting because I am inclined to assume that Beryl Markham was one of the most passionate people in the twentieth century.

There was another funny thing about this book. I don’t have it in front of me now or I would quote to you. She really back-loads her sentences. I think this might have been something that created the sense of apathy for me. I’m going to give an example of the kind of sentence I’m talking about, even though I don’t have the book, so I can’t give you a quote. It’s something like, “In the heat of the summer, when the warm breezes blew and people sat on their porches drinking lemonade, and before we had heard of airplanes, but after my father had started his flour processing plant, a stampede of elephants flattened our entire village.” It’s like, WHAT? WHOA. That sentence is not about the heat of summer. It is not easy for a stampede of elephants to sneak around, but they got into that sentence pretty stealthily. I guess it is sort of a litotes sentence structure, but I felt tossed about a little bit as a reader.

I read this because my boss and I were talking about the Swahili coast, and how beautiful it is. Markham grew up there and learned to fly planes there. What a beautiful and rough and interesting place to live.

Generally, I think this is a wonderful story. Over and over, I was stunned at how amazing this woman is. And, man, if there is anything that proves that women have always been badass, it is stories like this. I think, for people who love books like A Tree Grows in Brooklyn and Jeannette Walls's books, this is a great recommendation. You just get this sense that Markham did whatever the fuck she wanted to do, and she could not have cared less if someone told her not to. She just swatted them away and worked with more drive to get what she wanted. I am left with an unfortunate desire to read celebrity gossip about her, though. Who was the woman behind the legend? But, at the same time, I am glad at the dignity of the story, and I am unimpressed at my own unseemly dissatisfaction.

I am eternally grateful for my trusted, go-to book sources, but there is something to be said for broadening your reading network.

At the recent Modern Mrs. Darcy Book Club Reading Retreat we participated in a paperback book exchange. My new friend Raelene brought West with the Night and I snagged it based on the cover alone.

I would not have picked this book on my own. I am grateful I did because it is marvelous. I was captivated. I savored every word. Beryl Markham was something else- no-nonsense, feminine, ahead of her time. This memoir reads like fiction- snippets of her life told through impeccable writing set against the lush setting of Africa in the 1930's.

I could keep gushing, but I'll let Ernest Hemingway chime in. He said (about Markham) " ... can write rings around all of us who consider ourselves as writers ... it really is a bloody wonderful book."

This is all to say that sometimes interacting with readers whose taste differs from yours can be such a wonderful thing. I encourage you to reach out to those readers that are unlike you every now and then. They may send your next favorite book your way.

I rarely read autobiographies and rarely think much of those I read. If I must know the deep history of a person, I'll choose a biography; it's more likely to show a whole picture, warts and all. Yet here I am, not only finishing with an autobiography written in 1942, but giving it five stars, something I've done for less than ten percent of the books I've reviewed here. Why?

Because it's freaking beautiful.

Beryl Clutterbuck Markham was born in provincial England in 1902 but didn't stay there long. When she was four years old, her father upped sticks and moved to British East Africa (now Kenya) to start a race horse breeding stable and farm; little Beryl moved with him, leaving behind mother and big brother. (She doesn't mention her mother's reaction to this, though it was likely what you might expect -- "You want to do what???") Beryl grew up more-or-less feral, learning from the local indigenous people how to track and hunt. She grew up as, essentially, a young African boy until she grew into the white memsahib who precociously trained winning racehorses starting in her late teens.

Always on the hunt for something new, she learned to fly in 1931 (becoming the first female professional pilot in Africa) and made her living as a bush pilot and aerial safari guide. That (and a husband) eventually took her back to Britain and, in 1936, a record-breaking flight across the Atlantic, making her the first woman to solo across the ocean and the first pilot of any gender to cross from east to west. There the story ends, leaving the next 50+ years of her extraordinary life undocumented by her hand.

Whew.

With that kind of material to work with, Markham could be excused for unspooling it in language as straightforward and unvarnished as her personality and attitude. But she doesn't. Her prose is smooth and sure, her descriptions keenly observed and painted with achingly beautiful phrases that seem both fresh and timeless. Hemingway wrote to Maxwell Perkins, "She [Markham] has written so well, and marvelously well, that I was completely ashamed of myself as a writer." Quite an admission for a man with an ego the size of Saturn, but one I can quite agree with. The simple poetry of her words had me volleying between I wish I wrote that and I need to steal that. Julie Harris's narration drew out every ounce of gold in the material and made it come alive.

But gemlike language can't redeem poor storytelling. Luckily, Markham can tell a story as well as write it. She could've opened with a prosaic, I was born in the green countryside of England a year after Victoria Regina left it... Instead she starts, as they say, in media res: a pilot named Woody, "whom I knew so little and yet so well that I never bothered to remember his full name any more than most of his friends did," is missing in the vast Serengeti; a miner in a flyspeck called Nungwe is "choking his lungs out" for want of a bottle of oxygen; and Markham has to serve the needs of both at the risk of her own life. The two episodes resolve -- one satisfactorily, one poignantly -- and in both, the tiny, pitiful human characters are entirely eclipsed by an enormous, pitiless, raucously alive Africa, setting a theme for the rest of the book.

She sketches her life as vignettes, skipping around as it suits her. The girl hunting wild boar with Murani boys and a noble-hearted mongrel dog becomes the young woman, mature beyond her years, foaling and training race horses. The woman running a sprawling stud farm gives way to the flinty pilot throwing herself against the unknown when powered flight still balanced on the line between witchcraft and industry. Through it all, Markham faces the harsh calculus of being a woman in a man's world, on a man's continent, in a man's business, yet riding through or flying past the obstacles and hostility like a tornado plows through a town in its path.

There is one thing we modern-day readers have to reckon with: Markham was a white woman in a white-run colony that brooked no resistance from its black subjects. From time to time she makes a reference that reflects her time and station. I was prepared for this, even looking for it as reference for my own period characters in their own prejudices. What I didn't reckon on was how few of these slights there actually were. Every page rings with Markham's deep affection for Africa, its landscape, its animals, and its people. Its people are her friends, her playmates, her colleagues, and sometimes her employees; many are as close as family. Is this ethnology? No. But the harshest words the author aims at any person are directed against the white adventurers and exploiters and opportunists who disrespect her Africa and sometimes come to grief because of their greed or cupidity.

Markham leaves out a lot in her story. Her mother barely appears; she says nothing of an elder brother who died young. There's no mention of school, though she clearly got some academic education somewhere. How did the First World War affect colonial life? No idea. What was it like for her to navigate Kenya as an unparented teenager in the 1920s (her father decamped to Peru when drought sucked the life from his farm)? She doesn't say. She was married three times and kept a very, very busy bed (note for those of you who believe sex was invented in the 1960s: it wasn't); absolutely none of this appears on these pages.

West with the Night is the highlights reel from the first half of the life of a remarkable woman who, as Hemingway said, "can write rings around all of us who consider ourselves as writers." If you're looking for a tell-all, this isn't it. But what the author tells, she tells with grace and poetry. If you're in any way interested in reading about the exploits of a strong, determined woman in a bygone place and vanished society, run -- don't walk -- to your nearest bookstore or library and get this book.

“To see ten thousand animals untamed and not branded with the symbols of human commerce is like scaling an unconquered mountain for the first time, or like finding a forest without roads or footpaths, or the blemish of an axe. You know then what you had always been told -- that the world once lived and grew without adding machines and newsprint and brick-walled streets and the tyranny of clocks.”

You can be assured that this review will in no way be as well written as Beryl Markham's "West with the Night."

Markham was one hell of a woman, yet her story seems to have been lost to history. Born in England, but raised by her father in Africa, she never stepped back from a challenge and relished opportunities to look fear in the eye and have fear blink first. She was one of the first African bush pilots, the first racehorse trainer in the continent, and later the first person to fly non-stop east to west from England to North America. And yet, I'd never heard of her until I read Paula McClain's excellent Circling the Sun last year.

In addition to her many other talents, the woman can write. Hemingway famously praised this book by writing to a friend: "Did you read Beryl Markham's book, West with the Night? ...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."

In this memoir, Markham invites us to experience certain episodes of her life (note, it's not a chronological or complete memoir by any stretch). The writing is so evocative we are there with her in the air gripping the controls as her plane shakes back and forth in stormy turbulence; our hearts race with hers as she and her childhood companions move past a lion that has crossed their path; and we are jumping up and down in the stands in the final lap of a horse race.

Markham's writing is meant to be savored. "Slow reading" is a must for this book. Skimming will make your mind wander and leave you unsatisfied.

4.5 stars

What an exhilarating read/listen! In 1942, Beryl Markham wrote this memoir of her early years up through her historic 1936 flight across the Atlantic from London to North America. To me this was less of an autobiography or memoir and more of a recollection of her adventures growing up in Africa, hunting with the local tribes in British East Africa (later Kenya), training horses first with her father and then professionally, and learning to fly and becoming the first person to fly solo east across the Atlantic from London to North America.

Markham is a storyteller in the finest tradition, where the captivation of the audience is the main thrust rather than how “factual” the story is. In her introduction, Sara Wheeler says “Key events of Beryl’s childhood are reorganized, events are conflated and facts are distorted.” And I would add facts are left out - we don't hear anything about her husbands or her son and she only alludes to the her several affairs. But Beryl’s stories are all based in fact and the writing is exceptional. I laughed, I cried, my heart raced and I fell in love with this adventurous child and woman. The great Julie Harris narrated the audio book and made it that much more thrilling.

Call me obsessed, but I plan to read Circling the Sun and Straight on Till Morning: A Biography of Beryl Markham. Here are some links to articles about her:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beryl_M...
http://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/...
http://scandalouswoman.blogspot.com/2...

Beryl Markham (1902-1986) certainly led an adventurous life. Born in England, she moved to Kenya (then British East Africa) at age four. Her life included “up close and personal” experiences with African wildlife, training racehorses, and flying aircraft. She flew the African bush, bringing medical supplies to remote locations, spotting wildlife, and searching for downed pilots. She flew from Nairobi to London. She was the first woman to fly solo east to west over the Atlantic, from England to Nova Scotia.

Published in 1942, the majority of the book is focused on her life in Africa. She encounters lions, elephants, warthogs, zebras, and more. The final two chapters describe her solo flight. She keeps her private life private, sticking to career, colleagues, friends, and family.

What a wonderful memoir. Markham definitely had a way with words. Her writing is descriptive, eloquent, and artistic. Her love for Africa is unmistakable. I felt a sense of accompanying her on her flights. If you are looking for well-written non-fiction about a strong woman that led the life of a non-conformist, pick this one up. As an added bonus, Anna Fields does a first-rate job of voice acting in the audio book.

Beautifully Written

I didn't really know what to expect from this book. I didn't realize that there was so much of Africa in it.

Normally when I'm reading something that I enjoy immensely I end up reading it in one or two sittings. This book wanted to be savored and it took me a lot longer to read it.

I've never been a pilot and my view of flying is the more margaritas I have prior, the better. I used to want to fly when I was a kid. Not with any machine, but just to fly as a bird would. To me that represented the ultimate freedom.

This isn't really about being a pilot or being a woman pilot which I found refreshing. It is about Africa. Its vastness. Its dark nights and fierce animals. The wisdom of elephants and the solitary courage of a lion. The traditions of its people and the grace which Africa embraces change. It is beyond Africa, it is a journey through life which gives you a glimpse of the human soul.

Mahadma Ghandi said: Live as though you'll die tomorrow, but learn as though you'll live forever.

After many years I have finaly read this book. And what a joyous experience it was. Reading the author's own thoughts on the big events in her life, reminded me of reading the thoughts of Plato in his The Republic. Written so many thousands of years ago, The Republic still accommodates the spirit and mindset of one of the most influential people of all times. By reading his words, we can still hear a remarkable voice talking directly to us.

Beryl Markham's autobiography will never equal The Republic and become one of the classics of all times, however, her life story changed the lives of millions of people. And we could hear her own words as she meandered through a life of challenges, hardships, happiness and adventures.

In case you wonder how to identify a great classic:
Five elements:
1) addresses permanent & human concerns ( The Republic gave rise to the social order presented in the Bible for instance, and being applied to all modern societies ever since and therefor changed world history)
2) being a game changer - shift perspective
3) influences other great works (Shakespeare is one of them)
4) Respected by experts throughout the ages
5) Challenging, yet rewarding read.

In my  review of Circling the Sun by Paula McLain I mentioned the iconic accolade of Ernest Hemingway to the remarkable and outstanding writing skills of Beryl Markham. After reading the book, I have to agree. Claims of her third husband that he was the actual writer, was rebuffed with sound evidence that the book was already in the hands of Markham's editors when she met him. The book was published for the first time in 1942, but republished and unexpectedly elevated to bestselling status in 1983.

It's the story of an ultimate tomboy; a daring spirit; and unbreakable courage. She was deserted by her mother, lived with her father in Kenya in the heyday of British colonial times, and learnt early in life that her best friends, tutors and dedicated supporters would all be men. They taught her everything she needed to become the survivor and pioneering soul that she was.

She never claimed victim-hood. She never needed victim-hood status to become anyone. Her encounter with Paddy the lion, when she was attacked as a barefoot young girl, established her as a warrior of the truest kind.

n  ...the sound of Paddy’s roar in my ears will only be duplicated, I think, when the doors of hell slip their wobbly hinges, one day, and give voice and authenticity to the whole panorama of Dante’s poetic nightmares. It was an immense roar that encompassed the world and dissolved me into it. I shut my eyes very tight and lay still under the weight of Paddy’s paws.

... No animal, however fast, has greater speed than a charging lion over a distance of a few yards. It is a speed faster than thought—faster always than escape.n

She concurred the skies, liberated her soul, became fiercely independent but modest in her accomplishments. She was a star in her own right. But most of all, she fell deeply in love with Africa. Her knowledge, experience and lessons learnt in the African wild, bubbles perpetually through the pulsating veins of words.

n  Being thus all things to all authors, it follows, I suppose, that Africa must be all things to all readers. 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.n

And later she would say:

n  Why I ran at all or with what purpose in mind is beyond my answering, but when I had no specific destination I always ran as fast as I could in the hope of finding one — and I always found it.n

.Beryl Markham did not write a classic, she BECAME a classic, just by being Beryl Markham. Unforgettable.

A friend asked me this morning to recommend a book: "I need a great book. Story. No abuse. No overt drama. Just a great story."

I recommended this one. Of course there are a million others, but right now they do not remind me of Plato, or Mahatma Ghandi, or what knowledge can do for the human spirit. More importantly, what show, don't tell really mean in real life.

Mahatma Ghandi's words rang loud and clear when I finished this book. Beryl Markham lived as though she would die the next day, and learnt as though she would live forever. Yes, she did.

AMAZING.