I've recently read the "autobiography" "West With The Night" for a Hight School history class. While I found Markham's book to be a beautifuly spun story of growing up in colonial Kenya and life in the early 1900s, this book left me with more questions than answers. On digging deeper, I found that this book was written by her third husband, Raoul Schumacher. Also, I found that many interesting and scandalous parts of her life had been omitted from this historical tale. However, these things do not change the fact the "West With the Night" is a completly enrapturing tale of a very strong, determined woman. I only advise that you take this story with a grain of salt; and then go read the book "The lives of Beryl Markham" by Errol Trzebinski to get the real deal.

Beryl Markam's controversial "West with the Night" gives a vivid, personal view of life in colonial Kenya. A geat aviator and race horse trainer, Beryl Markham gives new life to women everywhere.

I went into this book with the intention of ripping it to pieces. I came away disagreeing with the message and impressed at how well Mr. Boyles writes.

Any professional writer should read this book, if for no other reason than to explore some of the better subtleties of the trade. This book is well written, clear, it moves admirably well considering the subject matter which I previously would have thought to be prose-proof. It shows how enjoyable even subjects that one would previously have had no interest in can come alive for a reader with the right author.

Buy this book.

Life and love, hardship and adventure, romance and history - all beautifully woven into a delightful autobiography of an unlikely heroine. The daughter of a poor white farmer trying to eke out a living in untamed and uncharted Africa, Beryl Markham rose from very humble beginnings to become a successful horse trainer, bush pilot, and the first person to fly east-to-west across the Atlantic from England. Her fantastic life seems to be one adventure after another, coincidentally commingled with the lives of Isak Dinesen (the author and heroine of "Out of Africa") and Denys Finch Hatton (played by Robert Redford in the movie, OOA). On this level alone, that of an adventure-packed historical tale, this book is compelling. But the absolute poetry of the narrative makes it inescapable.

Ms. Markham's inimitable flair for description and metaphor are enchantingly powerful. One could truly open the book to any random page and find a treasure. No previous knowledge of plot or precedence would be vital to the enjoyment. That such extraordinary prose also reveals an incredible life provides a rich dividend. Savor the following corsage randomly plucked from the bouquet:

"Arab Ruta... is of the tribe that observes with equal respect the soft voice and the hardened hand, the fullness of a flower, the quick finality of death. His is the laughter of a free man happy at his work, a strong man with lust for living. He is not black. His skin holds the sheen and warmth of used copper. His eyes are dark and wide-spaced, his nose is full-boned and capable of arrogance.

"He is arrogant now, swinging the propeller, laying his lean hands on the curved wood, feeling an exultant kinship in the coiled resistance to his thrust.

"He swings hard. A splutter, a strangled cough from the engine like the premature stirring of a sleep-slugged labourer. In the cockpit I push gently on the throttle, easing it forward, rousing the motor, feeding it, soothing it."

My first encounter with this charming book was accidental but fortuitous. I found the paperback in an airport bookstore, and stayed engrossed and enchanted by the lyrical meanderings for the entirety of my three-hour flight. A few years later I discovered the audio version which springs to an even greater life in the voice of Julie Harris. Her reading of the horse race that proved to be a watershed moment for Ms. Markham, still has the capacity to choke me to tears, though I have listened to it many times.

A few reviewers here have given less than laudatory reviews. This book is absolutely among the top five I have ever read, and I must pity those unfortunate souls who are tone-deaf to the rhapsodic music playing among its pages. Never mind my glowing endorsement. Never mind that Ernest Hemmingway said that Beryl Markham "has written so well, and marvelously well, that I was completely ashamed of myself as a writer." Just find this book and open it randomly to any page. You will quickly discover that this book is an extraordinary encounter. Don't miss it!

Historic, personal, and romantic tales of a female pioneer in aviation fill the pages of West with the Night. It is beautifully written, poetry put into chapters to tell of the adventures of the developing African frontier. The book follows the life of the Beryl Markham, the author, giving the reader a view into the lives of her native friends, the small social world of the British settlers, and a young girl growing up as the result of the integrating cultures. She is, herself, both fresh and new, one of the first to develop a mindset of blended customs. Besides observing the profits of the British cultural invasion of East Africa, the reader is, all the while, taken on a non-stop ride of African adventures. Like a child, pulling anxiously at your hand, sprinting onward toward further exploration, Markham speeds us through dangers ranging from leopards to the risks of early flight in an unmapped land. It is a mind-boggling world of naturally flowing chaos, deep thought, admiral respect, and truly amazing people, entirly unimaginable to the modern American. Markham has seen it like no one before her and few after, and when she puts it to paper, the reader can see directly into her heart. A must read.

Mere moments have passed since I closed the back cover on "West with the Night", and already I am missing its world and its voice. It is one of those rare books that can, with the simple fluidity of its narrative, pull you in and engulf you entirely.

I am not a big fan of the memoir, but Markham's (or whoever wrote it) voice is neither bombastic nor humble; she feels less a narrator or subject than a fellow traveller, along with you for the ride. Although the life she lived was extraordinary and compelling, she refreshingly views it in clipped, casual, careful terms, as unimpressed with herself as if she'd been a midwestern housewife, not a pilot and horse trainer in Colonial Africa.

Many readers will approach "West with the Night" out of a pre-existing interest in and knowledge of its era and characters, and will no doubt experience it entirely differently than I did. While a few names rang vague bells, for the most it was an engaging introduction. But I read it as literature, not as history, and enjoyed it immensely as such. I found her small personal anecdotes far more interesting than the accounts of her grand feats. The Atlantic flight that made her famous rounds out the end of the book, but is rather dry and dull compared to her African tales. Stories such as her father's pompous parrot had me in spasms of public giggles.

It is little wonder that Hemmingway praised this book, as the sparse directness of its utilitarian prose makes even the Old Man of the Sea seem a flowery romantic. Its structure can be rather meandering, but in that regard it resembles the contours of memory, which makes me believe Markham did indeed write her own book.

a book that only made me want to read more! on to read West with the Night and other Kenyan stories.

So I was a 12 year old tom boy looking for a hero and stumbled upon this bio. What Luck! I honestly can't remember reading of a person more adept at living, more intrinsically intersting and eccletic than Beryl Markham. Those looking for a quick fix can look at it like a story somewhere between Annie Oakley and a Barbra Stanwyk character. I'm 23 now and she's still a hero of mine. PS read West with Night before you order this.

This author wrote a biography of Denys Finch Hatton in which she doesn't mention any relationship between Beryl Markham and Denys Finch Hatton. Now that Beryl Markham is conveniently dead, she claims there was such a relationship--but she doesn't quote Beryl Markham on the matter. She does give a source--one elderly woman--but this doesn't seem convincing.

This book does bring up another side of the story from the previous biography of Markham ("Straight on Till Morning" by Lovell). It seems to me unusual that Markham never wrote anything after her divorce from Raoul Schumacher, so I believe that she didn't write "West With the Night."

This book is worth reading if you want information to construct your own theories as this author did.

I am only a third of the way through this book, and am already deeply saddened by it's content. After reading "West with the Night," I was anxious to know more about the mysterious Beryl Markham. How common that this book seems to concentrate on her alleged promiscuity rather than on her remarkable achievements for a woman during the 1920's. It reads more like a transcript from a British Jerry Springer episode. It's like going to an art gallery, and listening to some jealous wannabe fool babble on and on about the artist's "intent" or their "mood" during the creation of the piece of art; piecing together their indictment from hearsay. This book would be just grand for subscribers of People magazine.

I picked up this book after reading West with the Night and Out of Africa. This biography gave me the background needed to understand the drama behind those two books and how the two authors were linked before those books were ever written. Trzebinski painted a detailed picture of the people and life style of the British Colonists surrounding Beryl in Kenya although several times I found myself flipping back to previous pages in order to keep the names straight in my head. Beryl Markham was certainly a stubborn, selfish, promiscuous woman, everything Trzebinski pointed out in this book. What I found tragic was how much less emphasized was her triumph as a pilot compared to her promiscuity. Towards the end of her life, she was more known as the author of West with the Night than as a woman who flew across Atlantic alone. Even on the cover of this biography, the caption on the bottom on the page reads "A biography of the author of West with the Night." But is she really the author of that famous book? You'll have to read this biography to find out.