West with the Night (Audio Editions)

From Barnes & Noble

The Barnes & Noble Review
West with the Night is a memoir of exceptional range and quality. From a childhood breeding horses in Africa to her triumph as the first person to ever fly solo across the Atlantic from east to west, Beryl Markham had a life so extraordinary that the only possible final chapter was the creation of this work. The author states in the beginning, "I am no weaver. Weavers create. This is remembrance." It is also poetry. The language is elegant, and the content has a cinematic grandeur that contributes to the epic tone of the work. No less a writer than Ernest Hemingway highly praised Markham's writing. Weaver or not, Markham is an astounding storyteller, and the reader is left with a dignified tapestry of splendid significance. Julie Harris's finely measured intonation of the tales told here lends an often hypnotic quality to the audio edition.

The book is not only for those interested in Africa in the 1920s and '30s. It is not only about a woman of remarkable strength and intellect or the richness and timelessness of the African experience and landscape. It is also about a woman always set apart by birth, skin color, and education from her country and her community. It is about the problems of cultural and racial assimilation and the dueling perceptions of a young woman given an experience so far from ordinary that even she could not completely reconcile the differences. Elizabeth McMillan