I was glad when Markham returned to England to work on her cross-Atlantic flight and left the poor elephants alone! Sob! I adore elephants and was a little put out by statements like it’s okay to hunt elephants because they’re smart enough to evade humans, and that makes the two sides “equal.” Yeah? Does that elephant have an airplane to hunt you and a gun to shoot at you? Are they ripping off parts of your body and leaving you to die? I have issues with sport hunting in general, and elephant hunting in particular really disturbs me. The only bad thing about that part of the book was all the talk about hunting elephants for their tusks.

Eventually it came back to flight, and my interest was caught again. Once it get into Part 2 and beyond, where it talked about her childhood and about Africa in general, my interest started to fade. That was all new to me, so there was none of that repetitious feel. My favorite part of this memoir was Part 1, where she talks a lot about flying and the conditions involved in very early flying over much uncharted territory. I still enjoyed it more than Facing the Lion, but no where near as much as Out of Africa. It wasn’t repetitious within itself, so I’m sure a reader who hadn’t already read several memoirs from that region wouldn’t have this impression, but that made it less interesting for me than it should have been. Unfortunately, coming to West With the Night third, a lot of what Beryl Markham talks about with regards to Africa and Kenya felt repetitious to me. It was a little too young for me but I still remember certain scenes from it. The second is a more recent book, written for a middle-grade audience: Facing the Lion by Joseph Lemasolai Lekuton. I adored Out of Africa despite it being a very slow book, and I felt like I learned a lot from it. The first was Out of Africa by Isak Dinesen (Karen Blixen), who was actually a friend of Beryl Markham’s and referred to her in Out of Africa as a horse-riding tomboy named Felicity. Back in 2008, I read two other memoirs from that part of Africa. I was sort of middle-of-the-road on this book. At one point, she crossed the Atlantic from Europe to North America solo, one of the first people to do so. In her adulthood, she first worked with race horses and later became a pilot.

West with the Night by Beryl Markham