I've read many books about Kenya and East Africa (including this author's three biographies), and learned some new and interesting things from this book. The edition I read(Paperback), however, was so poorly written/edited as to make the content hard to follow and digest: people reoccurred from chapter to chapter without sufficient tie-ins; there were spelling errors, grammatical errors, and typographical errors.

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.

A superficial biography of a hunter. The author provides endless eulogies about what a swell guy Hatton was. Big deal. I was left with a big so what?

historical dokument of the life in east africa at the beginning of this century