West with the Night
Beryl Markham was raised on a farm in colonial Kenya, became one of the first women to train Thoroughbreds in East Africa, learned to fly bush planes, and in 1936 made the first solo east-to-west flight across the Atlantic. Her 1942 memoir is the great account of that life. Ernest Hemingway, no easy reviewer, said reading it made him feel like a carpenter beside her. The prose is exact and unsentimental, especially in the chapters about scouting elephant herds from low altitude or sitting up nights with sick horses. Authorship questions have followed the book, with some scholars crediting her second husband Raoul Schumacher for shaping the prose, but the experiences are unmistakably hers. Whoever finally pulled the sentences taut, the result is one of the finest aviation memoirs in English and a vivid record of early-twentieth-century East Africa.
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Beryl Markham's memoir of growing up in colonial Kenya, training racehorses, and flying solo across the Atlantic.
West with the Night was written by Beryl Markham.
West with the Night is available in hardcover, paperback, ebook, and audiobook formats from Amazon, Bookshop.org, ThriftBooks, and most major bookstores.