Green Hills of Africa

Unfortunately I bought this book without reading the synopsis. I have read many Hemingway books including other hunting tales.This one is actually written as a diary of an expedition. To me having people who carry your guns for you , and others who seek out and track game so you can shoot them for sport doesn't make you a great hunter. Very boring.

In this rare non-fiction work from Ernest Hemingway he brings to life a month long hunting expedition that he spent with his wife Pauline in Africa in nineteen-thirty-three, but he writes it in the true Hemingway tradition. Rather than having it read like a documentary he writes it in the form of a novel. Both entertaining and exciting it makes the reader hungry for the hunt. At times there is a bit of embellishment, such as making a clean kill on a Rhino at three-hundred yards with a Springfield rifle, (probably with open sights) in chapter four. Such probable exaggerations can be overlooked when we read his descriptions of the land and of the Masai and feel the remorse in his heart after wounding and losing a magnificent Sable Antelope to the jackals. It's my opinion that Green Hills of Africa is one of the finest hunting stories that has ever been written. Not for the sheer content of the story itself, but for the style, for Hemingway's style, ... and for the way that he recounts a true life adventure in the style of prose that has always proven so riveting in his fiction.

Green Hills of Africa absolutely captivated me. I was fascinated. As well as any of his writings, this book powerfully demonstrates Hemingway's prowess as a writer. It was not the subject matter that captured me--I maintain that setting is largely irrelevant to Hemingway's stories. Far more important is how he portrays people and the things that happen to them. That is what drew me into this book, and that is what makes Hemingway such an amazing author. Even if you are not into hunting, this is literature worth reading.

I read this book on a trip through South-East Asia, and it almost made me feel like I was in Africa instead. It's a true story, an account of a real safari, and Hemingway manages to make his readers feel his exitement, share his disappointment, and feel the same burning envy he must have felt seeing the trophy of his friend dwarfing the one of his own. A great story, maybe not quite so pretentious than some of his better known works, but still a hugely fun read.For ten bucks, you can't get any closer to Africa than that.

Hem is hunting both big game and big literature in "Green Hills." On this 1933-34 African safari, his jovial, Socratic drinking pal "Pop" is actually Phillip Percival the famous white hunter who conducted Theodore Roosevelt on his first African safari. As a young man, Hemingway owned a copy of TR's book "African Game Trails," and it is undoubtedly one of the reasons he went on this safari, which was financed to the tune of $25,000 Depression dollars by his wife Pauline's uncle Gus, part owner of Richard Hudnut cosmetics. Further evidence of Hem's fascination with Africa can be seen in the way Jake Barnes teases Robert Cohn in "The Sun Also Rises." In chapter two, Jake says, " Did you ever think about going to British East Africa to shoot?" Cohn's lack of enthusiasm for an immediate trek to Mombassa seals his fate as a jerk. "Green Hills" vindicates Hem's real aficion for hunting--filled with long descriptions of the arduous and sometimes futile tracking of game, not just celebratory "kills." Finally, the best preparation for reading "The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber" and "The Snows of Kilimanjaro" is to hike and sweat through these 300 pages of African "country." The long, crescent-horned sable which Hem was painstakingly stalking at the end of "Green Hills" never turned up. But instead, the experience of his African safari, was distilled into those two incredible stories--one about a coward who gets a chance to redeem himself and the other about a washed-up writer whose approaching death stimulates him to dream about--and the reader to enjoy--the fiction he never got to actually write. Unless you've got a rich uncle or wife, this is as close as you'll get to an East African safari, and it is very, very fine.

This is the first Hemingway I read and it remains the best. People who think Hemingway only writes in short sentences haven't read "Green Hills of Africa." He uses the longest sentences he can use and there isn't a paragraph in the whole book that isn't magical. After this I read "For Whom the Bell Tolls," a big disappointment, the prose bored me half to death, except for one absolutely brilliant section: the brutal execution of the village fascists by the village commies, as told in flashback by 'the mujer of Pablo.' Then I tried "the Sun Also Rises" which put me to sleep; couldn't finish it, eventhough a third grader could read it. So skip those two "classics" and read "Green Hills," if you want great prose and then start on "African Stories" by Doris Lessing if you don't mind being blown away.