West with the Night by Beryl Markham
294 pages
Published 1942
Read from May 30 to June 3
Rating: ★★★ out of 5
A girl grows up in colonial East Africa, hunting boar with a spear and a dog, finding her way into piloting aircraft and running a bush air service based in Nairobi, before becoming the first person to fly the Atlantic east to west from England to Nova Scotia. There's no way such a tale should be boring, and much of Markham's autobiography is absorbing in a quaint sort of way, but she spends so much time dwelling on horse training and patronizing affirmations of noble African purity and extended commentary on the perfidious nature of Italians that any given chapter is equally likely to inspire yawns. It comes with the time period, I suppose. I would have appreciated far more anecdotes about her colonial childhood or the bush piloting.
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