The old boar sees me, another enemy, and charges once more with magnificent courage, and I sidestep and plunge my spear to his heart. He falls forward, scraping the earth with his great tusks, and lies still. I leave the spear in his body, turn to Buller, and feel tears starting to my eyes. There were press cars parked outside the field at Abingdon, and several press planes and photographers, but the R.A.F. kept everyone away from the grounds except technicians and a few of my friends.

The book is not a linear biography. It's a collection of stories that Beryl thought interesting enough to write about. She included some really random stuff that made for interesting reading. The book covers all facets of her life through small anecdotes, so while it is not a complete biography, I felt I knew the woman well after reading this. Also, let me mention that I loved the fact that Beryl did not think it important enough to include her love life in this book, clearly showing that there were things other than men on her mind.He was shot and killed by the other man, who also believed in duty, and he was buried where he fell. It was so simple and so unimportant. Ernst Hemingway wrote that Beryl Markham could run rings around writers like him.I agree with that.There are some beautiful lines, e.g."I watched as an aeroplane invaded the stronghold of the stars."

I have lifted my plane from the Nairobi airport for perhaps a thousand flights and I have never felt her wheels glide from the earth into the air without knowing the uncertainty and the exhilaration of firstborn adventure. Beryl spent her childhood in Kenya, and grew up to breed champion racehorses and pilot planes. Encouraged by Antoine de Saint Exupery, she wrote what would become a classic memoir about Africa, West with the Night. It is absurd for a man to kill an elephant. It is not brutal, it is not heroic, and certainly it is not easy; it is just one of those preposterous things that men do like putting a dam across a great river, one tenth of whose volume could engulf the whole of mankind without disturbing the domestic life of a single catfish. He took the gun and held it the way they had told him to hold it, and walked where they told him to walk, smiling a little and looking for another man to fight. Record flights had actually never interested me very much for myself. There were people who thought that such flights were done for admiration and publicity, and worse. But of all the records—from Louis Blériot’s first crossing of the English Channel in nineteen hundred and nine, through and beyond Kingsford Smith’s flight from San Francisco to Sydney, Australia—none had been made by amateurs, nor by novices, nor by men or women less than hardened to failure, or less than masters of their trade. None of these was false. They were a company that simple respect and simple ambition made it worth more than an effort to follow.

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a b c Aschan, Ulf (1987). The Man Whom Women Loved. New York: St. Martin's Press. pp. 164–165. ISBN 9780312022495. In 1936, Markham became the first woman to travel across the Atlantic, east to west, and the first pilot to fly from England to North America. Her plane , The Messenger, was supposed to land in New York, but after 21 hours and 25 minutes, she crash-landed in Nova Scotia, miraculously surviving with only a gash to the forehead. What a tremendous life she led! I’ll admit that there are naturally portions of her story that she did not touch on. I could not deem her perfect, yet my admiration for her joy for living and risk-taking is quite genuine. I’d recommend this memoir to anyone that loves gorgeous writing, Africa, and strong, daring women. Beryl Markham will teach you to make the very most out of your dreams and opportunities! Intrigued, Gutekunst was able to find one lonely copy of West with the Night in a library and read the book in one sitting. Astounded, he immediately read it again, believing he had rediscovered literary gold. He showed the book to Evan Connell, the author of Mrs. Bridge; they sent it to North Point Press. W

The distant roar of a waking lion rolls against the stillness of the night, and we listen. It is the voice of Africa bringing memories that do not exist in our minds or in our hearts — perhaps not even in our blood. It is out of time, but it is there, and it spans a chasm whose other side we cannot see." Harmony comes gradually to a pilot and his plane. The wing does not want so much to fly true as to tug at the hands that guide it; the ship would rather hunt the wind than lay her nose to the horizon far ahead. She has a derelict quality in her character; she toys with freedom and hints at liberation.I cannot help but liken this alluring memoir to a love story – a romance of sorts between Beryl Markham and Africa – its landscape, its people, its dangers and its wonders. Probably like most readers, I’d first learned of Markham from Paula McLain’s fictional work, Circling the Sun. I was so inspired by her character in that one, that I knew I’d have to read this one someday. I have to admit, I put it off for nearly four years. I wasn’t quite sure it would measure up to my expectations. I mean, Markham was an adventuress – a wild child, a horse trainer, a pilot. How could she possibly write an engaging memoir? Well, she did that and more. Not only did the descriptions of her life and of Africa hold me spellbound, I was completely intoxicated by the beautiful prose. There is a very short list of the authors that I admire and respect, and whose work I will read countless times while all the other cheerless material I own only serves to fill the void of vacant shelf space. Hemingway was good; Jim Harrison is great; L’Amour not so bad. There are a few other contemporaries that I might add to this list should I have more space. There is also Harper Lee, who was the lone female—nothing against female writers, like the men, they are just few. But last week the female fraction of my list doubled when I read deep into the heart of Beryl Markham’s West with the Night. But before there were airplanes in Markham's life, there were horses. Beryl, like her father, raised and trained race horses. Beryl Markham was one of the pioneers of aviation in Africa.She grew up in Kenya in the early 1900s and also had a career as a racehorse trainer. I let Buller's head rest on the turf, stand up, and pull my spear from the body of the boar. Somewhere to the left there is a sound, but I do not recognize it and I can see only dim shapes that are motionless.