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West with the Night - Community Reviews back

by Beryl Markham
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Lillelara
Lillelara rated it 6 years ago
I groped for lights, got into a dressing-gown, and let fly a few whispered maledictions aimed at the head of Bacchus. But what I saw before me, when I opened the door, was no reeling Blix, nor even a swaying one. I have seldom seen a man so sober. He was grim, he was pale, he was Death warmed over. ...
BookPieces
BookPieces rated it 8 years ago
Beryl Markham lent me her wings while I was laid up on a hospital bed, almost paralyzed, with surgeons recommending that, in order for me to walk again, they would have to carve me up. Once they would leave, taking their medical insights with them, the weight of their Cartesian scientific history an...
BrokenTune
BrokenTune rated it 9 years ago
"I stumble out of the plane and sink to my knees in muck and stand there foolishly staring, not at the lifeless land, but at my watch. Twenty-one hours and twenty-five minutes. Atlantic flight. Abingdon, England, to a nameless swamp – nonstop." It is probably sacrilege to have read West with th...
Ruined by Reading
Ruined by Reading rated it 10 years ago
Circling the Sun is about pioneering female pilot Beryl Markham, but you wouldn’t know it for most of the book. Beryl’s aviation adventures act like a frame story for Beryl’s coming of age in Africa, where the story’s real focus lies. She has an unconventional childhood during which she is accepted ...
Chris' Fish Place
Chris' Fish Place rated it 10 years ago
Several GR friends read this and enjoyed it, so when it was offer on sale for Kindle I picked it up. It got put to the head of the TBR list after I read Circling the Sun by Paula McClain. McClain wrote quite passionately about the brilliant writing in this memoir, and portrayed Markham as a very i...
Bettie's Books
Bettie's Books rated it 10 years ago
bookshelves: paper-read, one-penny-wonder, african-continent, published-1942, tbr-busting-2012, autumn-2012, nonfiction, adventure, afr-kenya, colonial-overlords, library-in-norway, lifestyles-deathstyles Recommended to ☯Bettie☯ by: Themis-Athena (Does not and never will own a Kindle) Read from M...
Merle
Merle rated it 11 years ago
Dropping this memoir, at least for now, as of page 107. The writing isn't at all bad but the book simply hasn't engaged me. It's all events, descriptions of places and animal behavior... but remarkably short on people: personalities, relationships, emotions. Perhaps this is why some suspect the book...
Lisa (Harmony)
Lisa (Harmony) rated it 11 years ago
The book is a memoir by Beryl Markham, a pioneering record-breaking aviator and horse-trainer. Born in 1902, she came to Kenya when she was around four-years-old and grew up there, and the book covers the years from that childhood to her record-making crossing of the Atlantic in 1936. Her prose in t...
catpdx
catpdx rated it 12 years ago
Whether or not Beryl actually wrote the book herself - and the evidence seems fairly strong that she did not - it's a lovely read, and it hardly detracts from her many achievements. The colonial aspects, along with the sometimes thoughtless destruction of wildlife, while "appropriate" for their time...
Bettie's Books
Bettie's Books rated it 12 years ago
Dedication: For My FatherOpening quote:I speak of Africa and golden joys HENRY IV, Act V, Sc.3Opening:BOOK ONEI: Message from NungweHow is it possible to bring order out of memory? I should like to begin at the beginning, paiently, like a weaver at his loom. I should like to say, 'This is the place ...
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