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A review by libellum_aphrodite
Out of Africa by Isak Dinesen
3.0
Karen Blixen is a pretty impressive lady, and gives a very vivid account of Africa in the early 1900s. She reminded me of a lady running a store on a lonely highway in Alaska that we met while traveling there. Both were taking care of business and not about to let big scary animals get in their way.
My initially-rapt attention petered out about halfway through the book, but I really loved that first immersion, hence the the 3-star average rating.
It so happened that at the tail end of reading this, the movie showed up on Netflix. Meryl Streep portrays Karen as much less badass than I pictured her (although, to be fair, I was reading Karen's own account of herself). After watching, in an attempt to reconcile the differences between book and movie, I did a bit more background research and reading about the Blixen, Finch Hatton, and others from the story, and about the period in general. https://aelarsen.wordpress.com/2014/11/17/out-of-africa-wonderful-movie-fuzzy-history/ captured a great deal of interesting historical context in its comparison.
My initially-rapt attention petered out about halfway through the book, but I really loved that first immersion, hence the the 3-star average rating.
It so happened that at the tail end of reading this, the movie showed up on Netflix. Meryl Streep portrays Karen as much less badass than I pictured her (although, to be fair, I was reading Karen's own account of herself). After watching, in an attempt to reconcile the differences between book and movie, I did a bit more background research and reading about the Blixen, Finch Hatton, and others from the story, and about the period in general. https://aelarsen.wordpress.com/2014/11/17/out-of-africa-wonderful-movie-fuzzy-history/ captured a great deal of interesting historical context in its comparison.