Reading West with the Night (Beryl Markham) again. I really like her memoir.

Warning: For those more accustomed to the politically correct view of the world today, this book may not live up to your expectations.

A woman pilot? Scandalous!!

But a good book.....
lc

Hey, I really enjoyed that book. If it were possible for a woman to have balls...

I've been to that part of Africa and realized there is a lot of tooth and claw down there just waiting for you to screw up.

I saw somewhere that she had a "thing" with Antoine de Saint-Exupéry and that he may have ghost written some of the book. Whatever, it was a really good read.

YB

Hemingway said:

"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."

Sounds like Hemingway just didn't get some of what a few of her pilot contemporaries enjoyed. To my knowledge, he wasn't a pilot.

It cannot have been easy to be an independent and strong-willed woman in that era, especially among aviators. I'm sure she was a bitch, for the right reasons. Judging how today's male pilots react when a group of ladies form their own flying club, it had to have been much worse 70-80 years ago.

Great book, extremely talented writer.

I noticed here of all places, just the other day, with regard to the Christmas BBQ that someone wrote "Pilots and their wives" etc. I thought about Pokette Diana first.

"Pilots and their wives" ........

Hey! If you talkin' about me, I said 'significant other' which is quite gender neutral. Ok, Ok, 'Stag' is quite a little less so... , but I meant no harm!

Can't help it. MCP-No matter how I try.
lc

Excellent book, I really need to read it again.
The club she hung out at was the same one in "Out of Africa"
From what I hear the girl that wrote Out of Africa was the primped tea totaler of the group and didn't like Beryl Markham all that much, accounting on the fact Beryl Markham was well liked and she wasn't.(probably also had something to do with the fact that Beryl was having alot of extra fun with the guys) So long storie short,she left her out of the book.

My two heroes in aviation are Bob Hoover and Beryl Markham.