West with the Night

Markham, Beryl

ISBN 10: 0865471185 / ISBN 13: 9780865471184

Published by North Point Press, San Francisco, 1983

About this Item

294 pp. Cornes thumbed, no markings in text. Memoir of a woman aviator who flew mail planes in Africa and was the first to fly transatlantic, east to west, in 1936. She was profiled by a PBS documentary, "World Without Walls." Size: 8vo - over 7¾" - 9¾" tall. Seller Inventory # 000052

Bibliographic Details

Title: West with the Night

Publisher: North Point Press, San Francisco

Publication Date: 1983

Binding: Trade Paperback

Book Condition: Very Good

About this title

Synopsis:

West with the Night is the story of Beryl Markham--aviator, racehorse trainer, beauty--and her life in the Kenya of the 1920s and '30s.

Review:

One of the most beautifully crafted books I have ever read, with some of the most poetic prose passages I could imagine, such as the following, resonating with a stately and timeless quality so absent in our modern life:

There are all kinds of silences and each of them means a different thing. There is the silence that comes with morning in a forest, and this is different from the silence of a sleeping city. There is silence after a rainstorm, and before a rainstorm, and these are not the same. There is the silence of emptiness, the silence of fear, the silence of doubt. There is a certain silence that can emanate from a lifeless object as from a chair lately used, or from a piano with old dust upon its keys, or from anything that has answered to the need of a man, for pleasure or for work. This kind of silence can speak. Its voice may be melancholy, but it is not always so; for the chair may have been left by a laughing child or the last notes of the piano may have been raucous and gay. Whatever the mood or the circumstance, the essence of its quality may linger in the silence that follows. It is a soundless echo.

Born in England in 1902, Markham was taken by her father to East Africa in 1906. She spent her childhood playing with native Maruni children and apprenticing with her father as a trainer and breeder of racehorses. In the 1930s, she became an African bush pilot, and in September 1936, became the first person to fly solo across the Atlantic from east to west.