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Vox Hunt: This Book Is A Gift

May 8, 2007
8 comments

Book: Show us a book that you like to give as a gift.
Submitted by Ross.

This is a wonderful book that I first received from my friend Cora. I have no idea how many copies she's given out over the years but all have found grateful homes. This is a perfect gift for anyone who loves literature but, perhaps, young women in particular. Odds are you may have to search for a used copy.

Born in England, the young Beryl Markham trained horses in Kenya. She later took up flying, becoming a bush pilot and the first person to fly the Atlantic Ocean east to west (solo non-stop flight). These experiences are the basis of West With The Night. There is some controversy that the writing was actually that of her third husband but the stories are all Markham.

"There are all kinds of silences and each of them means a different thing. There is the silence that comes with morning in a forest, and this is different from the silence of a sleeping city. There is silence after a rainstorm, and before a rainstorm, and these are not the same. There is the silence of emptiness, the silence of fear, the silence of doubt. There is a certain silence that can emanate from a lifeless object as from a chair lately used, or from a piano with old dust upon its keys, or from anything that has answered to the need of a man, for pleasure or for work. This kind of silence can speak. Its voice may be melancholy, but it is not always so; for the chair may have been left by a laughing child or the last notes of the piano may have been raucous and gay. Whatever the mood or the circumstance, the essence of its quality may linger in the silence that follows. It is a soundless echo."

Ernest Hemingway said

"... 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 as writers ... it really is a bloody wonderful book."