West with the Night is the story of Beryl Markham--aviator, racehorse trainer, beauty--and her life in the Kenya of the 1920s and '30s.
One of the most beautifully crafted books I have ever read, with some of the most poetic prose passages I could imagine, such as the following, resonating with a stately and timeless quality so absent in our modern life:
There are all kinds of silences and each of them means a different thing. There is the silence that comes with morning in a forest, and this is different from the silence of a sleeping city. There is silence after a rainstorm, and before a rainstorm, and these are not the same. There is the silence of emptiness, the silence of fear, the silence of doubt. There is a certain silence that can emanate from a lifeless object as from a chair lately used, or from a piano with old dust upon its keys, or from anything that has answered to the need of a man, for pleasure or for work. This kind of silence can speak. Its voice may be melancholy, but it is not always so; for the chair may have been left by a laughing child or the last notes of the piano may have been raucous and gay. Whatever the mood or the circumstance, the essence of its quality may linger in the silence that follows. It is a soundless echo.
Born in England in 1902, Markham was taken by her father to East Africa in 1906. She spent her childhood playing with native Maruni children and apprenticing with her father as a trainer and breeder of racehorses. In the 1930s, she became an African bush pilot, and in September 1936, became the first person to fly solo across the Atlantic from east to west.
Customer Reviews:
Avg. Customer Rating: 4.5 / 5.0
How I found this ...:
I am not quite sure how I happened upon this book but i am glad I did. The writing is a beautiful portrait of Kenya in the early 20th centure. Written from the view of English settlers, Beryl Markham was quite a character. Rumor has it that she may not have penned the book herself. I would like to learn more.
Beautifully written account of life in East Africa:
My grandparents went to East Africa in the 1920s. My grandfather, a Scotsman, was looking for gold, my grandmother, a South African was looking for romance. My mother was born in the year this book opens.
When I was a child my mother regaled me with stories of scorpions, leopards amd pythons, and this book rekindled my memories of childhood.
It is a well-written account of a wild child's life in Kenya, hunting with the local people, being hunted by the local animals, and seeing the tribes as... more info
West With the Night:
An excellent book!
Ernest Hemingway wrote, "She writes rings around us!" and he wasn't just being nice!
A good story, well written; what more could you ask for?!
West with the Night:
I read this book because someone suggested my family might have been related to Beryl Markham, which is not the case, but...
What a woman - this is a true account of one of the first bush pilots in Africa, Beryl Markham, who was the first pilot to fly westward across the Atlantic from England. Although there is some dispute whether she actually wrote this autobiographical account (some say that her paramour, who edited the book, actually wrote it - she never confirmed or denied it), the stories are... more info
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