CSAF Reading List Reviews: West with the Night Published March 21, 2013 By Staff Sgt. Susan L. Davis 319th Air Base Wing Public Affairs GRAND FORKS AIR FORCE BASE, N.D -- "West with the Night," by Beryl Markham is a collection of memoirs chronicling the author's time as a British-born Kenyan aviatrix, adventurer and racehorse trainer. In the early days of aviation, she became the first woman to fly solo across the Atlantic Ocean from east to west, against the wind, completely covered in darkness. She spent the first four years of her childhood in Britain before her father moved her and her family to Kenya (then known as British East Africa) to purchase and work on a farm and train horses there. Markham's mother hated the isolation and immediately went back to England, but Markham stayed on the farm with her father, and spent her childhood learning, playing and hunting with the natives. In her adulthood, she took up racehorse training, becoming the first licensed female horse trainer in Kenya. She also took to the skies, working for some time as a bush pilot spotting game animals from the air and signaling their locations to safaris on the ground. Markham was outspoken, independent and eccentric. Markham certainly knew how to paint a visual picture with words in "West with the Night." Even Ernest Hemingway called it a "wonderful book," saying, "...she has written so well, and marvelously 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 she can write rings around all of us who consider ourselves writers." She evokes imagery reminiscent of a National Geographic documentary in the way she describes the majesty and untamed wilderness of the African continent: "It [Africa] is still the host of my darkest fears, the cradle of mysteries always intriguing, but never wholly solved. It is the remembrance of sunlight and green hills, cool water and the yellow warmth of bright mornings. It is as ruthless as any sea, more uncompromising than its own deserts. It is without temperance in its harshness or its favours. It yields nothing, offering much to men of all races." The reader can pick up tones of Joseph Conrad's "Heart of Darkness" in the way she relates characters whose lust for riches, glory and power become their undoing. In the chapter entitled "Men With Blackwater Die," she writes of a German or a Dutchman by the last name of Bergner who is dying of "blackwater," a complication of malaria leading to kidney failure. "'...The sick chap's a gold miner. Lungs gone. Weak heart. He's still alive, but for God knows how long. They keep coming out here and they keep dying. There's gold all right, but it'll never be a boomtown--except for the undertakers.'" But for all of her verbal picture painting, "West with the Night" does not read like a traditional chronological sequence of events; each chapter is a short story in itself dealing with one aspect or another of Markham's life. It is a stream of consciousness centering on the two main focal points of the book: Africa and aviation. The characters are colorful despite the very small roles they play in the book, and after reading about each one, the reader is left with little more than a sampling of each one's features, temperament and characteristics before moving on to the next. I suspect her memoir ended up on the CSAF Reading List for three reasons: First, she holds the record for being the first woman to undertake a solo, non-stop flight from Europe to North America, and was celebrated as a pioneer of aviation. Second, when "West with the Night" was published in 1942, it got strong reviews coming out of the gate, though oddly, the book did not sell very well, and quickly went out of print. Her work was rediscovered in 1982 when a California restaurateur read a collection of letters from Ernest Hemingway, including the one where he showered her with praise for "West with the Night," and managed to convince California publisher North Point Press to re-issue the book in 1983. It became a surprising bestseller. Listing her memoir on the CSAF Reading List helps bring the book back out of obscurity. Third, Beryl Markham embodied the daring, intrepid spirit that beckoned our Air Force pioneers to climb into the wild blue yonder. In the chapter entitled, "Why Do We Fly?" Markham recounts a conversation she had with her friend Woody, a fellow pilot, after his German Klemm airplane went down over the continent and had to be rescued. "'Why do we fly?'" he asked. "'We could do other things. We could work in offices, or have farms, or get into the civil service.'" Markham answered, "'We could give up flying tomorrow... You could walk away from your plane and never put your feet on a rudder bar again. You could forget about weather and night flights and forced landings, and passengers who get airsick, and spare parts you can't find, and wonderful new ships you can't buy... You might be a very happy man, so why don't you?'" "' I couldn't bear it,' said Woody. 'It would all be so dull.'" Markham died at the age of 83 in 1986 in Nairobi, Kenya, having lived a full and adventurous life, leaving a legacy of a record solo flight, and her best known work, "West with the Night." Editor's note: In this series, the author explores and reviews a selection of the 13 titles featured on the 2013 Chief of Staff Reading List. General Ronald Fogleman created the CSAF Professional Reading Program in 1996 to develop a common frame of reference among Air Force members--officers, enlisted, and civilians--to help each of us become better, more effective advocates of air and space power. Each CSAF since then has enhanced and continued the Professional Reading Program.