West with the Night

Common card · No. 459436

West with the Night is a 1942 memoir by Beryl Markham, chronicling her experiences growing up in Kenya (then British East Africa) in the early 1900s, leading to celebrated careers as a racehorse trainer and bush pilot there. It is considered a classic of outdoor literature and was included in the United States' Armed Services Editions shortly after its publication. In 2004, National Geographic Adventure ranked it number 8 in its list of the 100 best adventure books. Ernest Hemingway was deeply impressed with Markham's writing, saying "she has written so well, and marvelously well, that I was completely ashamed of myself as a writer. I felt that I was simply a carpenter with words, picking up whatever was furnished on the job and nailing them together and sometimes making an okay pig pen. But [she] can write rings around all of us who consider ourselves as writers ... it really is a bloody wonderful book." Markham was the first person to fly across the Atlantic Ocean from east to west in...

Read on Wikipedia