Fourteen members attended the Book Club meeting in April, held at the home of Barbara Young. We introduced ourselves to one new and two recent additions to the group, and then a lively discussion ensued. The book of choice was “West with the Night” by Beryl Markham. This is her memoir about growing up in British East Africa, now Kenya, and many of her passages are very descriptive of the vastness of the land. Markham is an interesting historical figure for her achievements in aviation and adventuring. For example, she was the first female bush pilot in the continent, the first woman to complete an East-to-West nonstop crossing of the Atlantic (ending into a near-crash landing in Cape Breton), and a legendary race horse trainer. And she was a bit of a celebrity among the glitterati that set down or passed through Nairobi in her time, a circle that included the famous Swedish safari hunter Baron Blixen and his wife Karen, who wrote “Out of Africa” under the name Isak Dinesen. (More about these connections is to be found in Paula Mclain’s “Circling the Sun.”)
