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Older books reflect the values of the period when they were written, so yes, there is colonialism and hunting. But this memoir of Beryl Markham's life and adventures was so good. What an independent and amazing life. Highly recommend the audio version - I think the chapter with the horse race may be the best book segment I've heard. ( )
One of the several memoirs from 20th century British East Africa. I can see why Hemingway might have liked it, since he knew Ms. Markham and her friends, she was an adventurer, she was involved in big game hunting, and her writing has the same colonial class stiff upper lip essence mixed with attractive observations of bygone Africa that Hemingway was drawn to. It is interesting to see Markham's view of Bror Fredrik von Blixen-Finecke. There is no mention of his wives (especially of his first wife, whose "Out of Africa" is a different and, for my money, more moving work), or of his womanizing and venereal diseases. ( )
Reason read: TIOLI, adventure, ROOT, alpha I mostly enjoyed this memoir or autobiography by Beryl Markham. So impressive to have been an independent woman in Africa, trainer of race horses, and a pilot. Not in the ordinary sense of pilots nowadays but in a time when flying was relatively new and Africa quite wild. She flew alone, had her own business. She delivered and she scouted elephants for game hunting. I didn't like to hear about the hunting of the elephants but she really wasn't pro killing of elephants but did not see a reason not to get paid to scout them. The book title is from her last flight recorded in the book which was an effort to fly solo across the Atlantic, west with the night. ( )
Beryl Markham was an original, a woman who mastered men's pursuits in what was very much a man's world, and an amazing writer. Her memoir is a love song to Africa, the Africa of long ago and faraway. She wrote in the 1940's, when attitudes towards race and colonialism were very different: it would be a shame if discomfort with these attitudes kept readers away from an amazing book. ( )
Informação do Conhecimento Comum em inglês.Edite para a localizar na sua língua.
"I speak of Africa and golden joys." -- Shakespeare, Henry IV, Act V, Sc. 3
Dedicatória
Informação do Conhecimento Comum em inglês.Edite para a localizar na sua língua.
For my Father
"I wish to express my gratitude to Raoul Schumacher for his constant encouragement and his assistance in the preparations for this book."
Primeiras palavras
Informação do Conhecimento Comum em inglês.Edite para a localizar na sua língua.
"How is it possible to bring order out of memory?"
Citações
Informação do Conhecimento Comum em inglês.Edite para a localizar na sua língua.
Namen sind die Schlüssel für Türen, hinter denen Halbverschüttetes liegt, verschwommen für den Verstand, vertraut jedoch im Herzen. - S.14
Niemals zögern oder zaudern, niemals sich umdrehen und niemals glauben, dass eine Stunde, an die man sich erinnert, eine bessere Stunde ist, weil sie tot ist. Vergangene Jahre scheinen sichere Jahre zu sein, eine entschwundene, gefahrlose Zeit, während die Zukunft, wie in einer konturlosen Wolke, aus der Ferne bedrohlich wirkt. Dringt man in die Wolke ein, so klart sie auf. - S. 144
Ich lernte, was jedes träumende Kind wissen muss - dass kein Horizont zu weit ist, um bis zu ihm und über ihn hinaus vorzustoßen. - S. 198
Was immer der Mensch unternimmt, Würde erlangt sein Bemühen erst, wenn echte Arbeit dahintersteckt, und fühlt man dann das Bedürfnis, sein - im Wortsinn - Handwerk auszuüben, so begreift man, dass die anderen Dinge - all die Experimente, die Eitel- und Nichtigkeiten, denen man nachjagte - ganz einfach unsinnig waren. - S. 298
...every farmer is a midwife. There is no time for mystery. There is only time for patience and care, and hope that what is born is worthy and good. p. 121
No human pursuit achieves dignity until it can be called work, and when you can experience a physical loneliness for the tools of your trade, you see that the other things--the experiments, the irrelevant vocations, the vanities you used to hold--were false to you. p. 278
Life is life and fun is fun, but it's all so quiet when the goldfish die. p. 218
I am incapable of a profound remark on the workings of Destiny. It seems to get up early and go to bed very late, and it acts most generously toward the people who nudge it off the road whenever they meet it.
They were dark days heavy-scented with gloom. All the petty joys of early youth, the games, the friendships with the Nandi totos lost their lustre. Time became a weight that would not be moved until the bodies themselves had been moved and grass roots had found the new earth of the graves, and the women had cleaned the vacant huts of the dead and you could see the sun again.
Wherever you are, it seems, you must have news of some other place, some bigger place, so that a man on his deathbed in the swamplands of Victoria Nyanza is more interested in what had lately happened in this life than in what may happen in the next. It is really this that makes death so hard—curiosity unsatisfied.
I wanted to call out for Ebert, for anyone. But I couldn't say anything and no one would have heard, so I stood there with my hands on Bergner's shoulders feeling the tremor of his muscles pass through my fingertips and hearing the rest of his life run out in a stream of little words carrying no meaning, bearing no secrets—or perhaps he had none.
The farm at Njoro was endless, but it was no farm at all until my father made it. He made it out of nothing and out of everything—the things of which all farms are made.
They wore hats, bandannas, jackets of home-cured hide, shukas, shorts, boots or no boots, and it didn't matter. Altogether it made a uniform—not for a man, but for a body of men. Each contributed to the distinguished style and colour of a regiment that had had its predecessors once in America, but had not, in this war, a counterpart.¶ They had come to fight, and they stayed and fought—some because they could read and understand what they read, some because they had listened to other men, and some because they were told that this, in the name of civilization—a White Man's God more tangible than most—was their new duty.
The days that marked the war went on like the ticking of a clock that had no face and showed no time.
What a child does not know and does not want to know of race and colour and class, he learns soon enough as he grows to see each man flipped inexorably into some predestined groove like a penny or a sovereign in a banker's rack. Kibii, the Nandi boy, was my good friend. Arab Ruta, who sits before me, is my good friend, but the handclasp will be shorter, the smile will not be so eager on his lips, and though the path is for a while the same, he will walk behind me now, when once, in the simplicity of our nonage, we walked together.¶ No, my friend, I have not learned more than this. Nor in all these years have I met many who have learned as much.
In any country almost empty of men, 'love thy neighbor' is less a pious injunction than a rule of survival. If you meet one in trouble, you stop—another time he may stop for you.
there was nothing but rolling downs that went on and on in easy waves until they broke against the wall of the sky.
If a man has any greatness in him, it comes to light, not in one flamboyant hour, but in the ledger of his daily work.
I think he could track a honeybee through a bamboo forest.
But on that morning you could see nothing; mountain mist had stolen down from Kenya during the night and captured the country.
You could expect many things of God at night when the campfire burned before the tents. You could look through and beyond the veils of scarlet and see shadows of the world as God first made it and hear the voices of the beasts He put there. It was a world as old as Time, but as new as Creation's hour had left it.¶ In a sense it was formless. When the low stars shone over it and the moon clothed it in silver fog, it was the way the firmament must have been when the waters had gone and the night of the Fifth Day had fallen on creatures still bewildered by the wonder of their being.
I wonder if I should have a change—a year in Europe this time—something new, something better, perhaps. A life has to move or it stagnates. Even this life, I think.¶ It is no good telling yourself that one day you will wish you had never made that change; it is no good anticipating regrets. Every tomorrow ought not to resemble every yesterday.
Each humid, tropic day is stillborn, and does not breathe, however lustily pregnant the night that gave it birth.
Últimas palavras
Informação do Conhecimento Comum em inglês.Edite para a localizar na sua língua.
She was old and weather-weary, and she had learned to let the world come round to her."
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