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Jan 12, 2011jrj9 rated this title 4.5 out of 5 stars
I picked this up by chance in a second-hand store, and was about to return it to the shelf when the review on the back caught my eye: "Did you read Beryl Markham's book, West with the Night? I knew her fairly well in Africa and never would have suspected that she could and would put pen to paper except to write in her flyer's log book. As it is, 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 writers. The only parts of it that I know about personally, on account of having been there at the time and heard the other people's stories, are absolutely true . . . I wish you would get it and read it because it is really a bloody wonderful book."--Ernest Hemingway Needless to say, I bought it, read it, and read it again. Hemingway was many things, but in this, he was not wrong. The least interesting thing I can say about this book is that it's all true.