Don't know why it took me so long to get around to reading it, but it was well worth spending the two evenings it took to get through English-born Kenyan Beryl Markham's excellent 1942 memoirs.

You may remember her as the first woman to fly from England to North America, or as the woman who was depicted as the tomboy "Felicity" in the film "Out of Africa," or the woman who embarrassed the British Royal Family with her affair with the Duke of Gloucester.

Sorry folks, but her book does not mention her well-known affairs with the Duke, white hunter Denys Finch Hatten, pilot Tom Campbell Black or Baron Blixon, or her friendship with author and mentor Karen Blixen whose husband and lover she "borrowed."

It does talk about her time as a horse trainer in East Africa, her pre-WWWII flights across Africa to fly freight and passengers, and to spot elephants from the air for hunting safaris, and her record-setting flight that ended in a crash landing in Nova Scotia.

There also are some extremely interesting bits from her childhood on her father's farm, including being attacked by a "pet" lion, her killing a warthog with a spear, and having a leopard run off with a dog that was sleeping at the foot of her bed.

There is some controversy about whether Markham actually wrote the book, but here is what none other than Ernest Hemingway had to say about it:

"Did you read Beryl Markham's book, West With The Night? ...She has written so well, and marvellously 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 this girl, who is to my knowledge very unpleasant and we might even say a high-grade bitch, can write rings around all of us who consider ourselves as writers ... it really is a bloody wonderful book."

I can't disagree.

Bill Quimby

Good book, good looking woman too with alot of pluck.

Agreed that it is a good read. I read her book a couple of years ago and loved it.

Twice read, twice enjoyed. I especially enjoyed her flying adventures.