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babsaway14 's review for:
West with the Night
by Beryl Markham
Anyone who knows me well understands that I have a thing for books by or about women in which the primary story isn't about their search for the perfect relationship. Unrequited love, when not accompanied by spaceships, the apocalypse, or in the guise of a man in his 50s for his prepubescent stepdaughter, does not happily hold my interest.
So it was with great joy that I happened upon Beryl Markham's memoir of living and working in Africa. What a life! And better for the reader, what a classic and uncluttered writing style that depicted that life on page after page. Markham, a girl and then a woman of the Empire in Africa, lived on her father's grain farm in Kenya. But the book is as much about the air as it is about the land, as Markham was an aviatrix (an absolutely brilliant word).
I liked this book as much for what she left out as for what she put in. Markham makes no mention of her love life, and having explored her various exploits on the internet, her marriages/affairs would have been easy fodder. But those stories would have become The Story and the reader would have missed the far more compelling but less gratuitous relationships between Markham and the local population who lived and worked with her, as well as the genuine friendships with her mentors.
I want to own this book, I liked it so much.
So it was with great joy that I happened upon Beryl Markham's memoir of living and working in Africa. What a life! And better for the reader, what a classic and uncluttered writing style that depicted that life on page after page. Markham, a girl and then a woman of the Empire in Africa, lived on her father's grain farm in Kenya. But the book is as much about the air as it is about the land, as Markham was an aviatrix (an absolutely brilliant word).
I liked this book as much for what she left out as for what she put in. Markham makes no mention of her love life, and having explored her various exploits on the internet, her marriages/affairs would have been easy fodder. But those stories would have become The Story and the reader would have missed the far more compelling but less gratuitous relationships between Markham and the local population who lived and worked with her, as well as the genuine friendships with her mentors.
I want to own this book, I liked it so much.