The Lives of Beryl Markham: The Rise and Fall of America's Favorite Planet

Read this book with an open mind. Beryl Markham was not a typical heroine and you will not like everything you read about her. The author is a well-respected writer of British colonial topics and should not be heavily criticized simply by presenting Markham for who she was: a complicated individual.

I bought this book as a gift, and it was very well received. Thank you.

Several writers have suggested what is really a sensible solution - Beryl was not an author in the traditional sense, she wrote about her life and experiences, so her efforts when trying to write commercially were plagued by her disinterest and lack of ability. She did write beautifully in West as well as those of her stories presented in the first section of Splendid Outcast, but if you compare them with ones at the end of the book, that the author suggests were probably written jointly with Rauol, the stylistic differences are clear. She was not a "writer" who could churn out material for publication, she could write about the things she knew and loved.As to being promiscious and occasionally ornery, she saw no reason to act any differently than men acted in her world, and good for her!

I picked up this book after reading West with the Night and Out of Africa. This biography gave me the background needed to understand the drama behind those two books and how the two authors were linked before those books were ever written. Trzebinski painted a detailed picture of the people and life style of the British Colonists surrounding Beryl in Kenya although several times I found myself flipping back to previous pages in order to keep the names straight in my head. Beryl Markham was certainly a stubborn, selfish, promiscuous woman, everything Trzebinski pointed out in this book. What I found tragic was how much less emphasized was her triumph as a pilot compared to her promiscuity. Towards the end of her life, she was more known as the author of West with the Night than as a woman who flew across Atlantic alone. Even on the cover of this biography, the caption on the bottom on the page reads "A biography of the author of West with the Night." But is she really the author of that famous book? You'll have to read this biography to find out.

After reading West with the Night (Beryl Markham), one should read this well researched and written book providing a detailed biography of the life of a remarkable woman. It is an altogether fascinating story and sheds much light on the murky areas of Markham's life, in particular the authorship of West with the Night