This book is an account of Ernest Hemingway’s safari with his fourth wife Mary in late 1953 and early 1954. This trip ended abruptly in January 1954 after they had two near-fatal plane crashes in East Africa. While back in Havana, Hemingway wrote his “African Book,” and completed it in 1956. He left this manuscript, along with those for A Moveable Feast, Islands in the Stream, and The Garden of Eden, in a safe deposit box in Cuba. Under Kilimanjaro is the last of Hemingway’s manuscripts to be published in its entirety.

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One of my favorite genres of literature is adventure literature, especially when the subject is Africa. A Hunter’s Wanderings in Africa is an excellent example.

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I was coming home from Key West Florida and had already finished everything I had taken to read. In the Key West Airport, I picked up a copy of To Have and Have Not. I finished half of the novel on the flight home to Birmingham from Key West. It is a quick and easy read.

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This is an enjoyable and informative read. There are two sections to the book, one is primarily about the history and the process of making an English side by side shotgun and what makes a gun a London “best gun”. The other part is about shooting with consistency.

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Theodore Rex is a well written and informative book about the Presidential years of Theodore Roosevelt. It begins in 1901 right before the McKinley assassination and ends after Taft takes office in March of 1909.

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“Show me a family of readers, and I will show you the people who move the world.”

- Napoleon Bonaparte

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“I was trying to learn to write, commencing with the simplest things, and one of the simplest things of all and the most fundamental is violent death.”

- Ernest Hemingway, Death in the Afternoon

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Tenth Legion is one of the best and most hilarious books I have ever read about turkey hunting. “Many people who hunt turkeys do so with an attention to detail, a regard for strategy, tactics, and operations, and a disregard for personal comfort and convenience that ranks second only to war. As for all cultists, it never occurs to them that they may be anachronisms. Supremely unconscious of the rest of the world, blind and deaf to logic and reason, they walk along their different roads in step to the music of their different drums.”

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African Game Trails is written by Theodore Roosevelt and is an account of a safari he took with his son Kermit in East Africa starting out in March of 1909 sailing from New York and ending in Khartoum in March of 1910. The purpose of this expedition was to collect birds, mammals, reptile, plants and especially specimens of big game for the The National Museum at Washington, the Smithsonian and the American Museum of Natural History, New York.

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East of Eden was published in September 1952. It is the tale of two families, The Trasks and the Hamiltons. It is regarded as the most ambitious work of Steinbeck. The novel is packed full of themes that involve the human condition. Some of the major themes covered are depravity, love, struggle for acceptance and greatness, the capacity for self-destruction, guilt and freedom. Throughout the book these themes are tied together in a way that parallels the book of Genesis in the Bible, especially the story of Cain and Abel. The title of the novel itself comes from Genesis, Chapter 4, verse 16: “And Cain went out from the presence of the Lord, and dwelt in the Land of Nod, on the east of Eden.”

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I enjoyed reading this book. It is not what I expected at all. Most of the books and literature I have read on fishing have either been technical or more often reflective essays or stories about the experience in more of a romantic or Zen kind of way. A lot of this book is about a ruthless pursuit by very wealthy and obsessed people that are chasing world records and how that, among other factors, helps destroy a wonderful fishery.

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Theodore Roosevelt was a true Renaissance man. He was an author, conservationist, naturalist, explorer, soldier, politician and sportsman. He published A Book-Lover’s Holidays in the Open in 1916, just four years before his death at age 60, he died of a pulmonary embolism in his sleep at his home at Sagamore Hill, in Oyster Bay, New York.

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It was a fine, bright day in August 1968, in The Sportsman’s Arms Hotel in Nanyuki, when W. Robert Foran knew death was coming. Calmly, he ordered a bottle of champagne and, raising a last toast to his eighty-eight years of life during which he had outlived all the legendary African big game hunters, he died, like the gentleman he always was.

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I decided to read this novel after reading A Moveable Feast, by Ernest Hemingway because of the chapter “Ford Madox Ford and the Devil’s Disciple”. I am a big fan of 20th century literature, especially the expat crowd that hung out on the Paris Left Bank and I had never read anything by Ford. I was surprised to find that The Good Soldier was high on several lists of greatest novels and some have even called it one of the greatest novels ever written. I have never seen much commentary or mention of it until I looked for it and doubt that I would have ever paid him any attention if it were not for his association with Hemingway.

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Long Walk to Freedom is an autobiography written by South African President Nelson Mandela. It was first published in 1994. The book covers his early years as a child, his education and 27 years in prison. He was jailed at the infamous Robben Island for his role as a leader of the ANC. Under the apartheid government he was regarded as a terrorist. Later, after release from prison, he was to become the President of South Africa and was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.

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I greatly enjoyed this version of A Moveable Feast. The first posthumously published edition came out in 1964 and was edited by Mary Hemingway. The new edition has a forward by Patrick Hemingway and was edited by Sean Hemingway and includes material that was left out of the first edition.

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“So it is… that we can seldom help anybody. Either we don’t know what part to give or maybe we don’t like to give any part of ourselves. Then, more often than not, the part that is needed is not wanted. And even more often, we do not have the part that is needed. It is like the auto-supply shop over town where they always say, ‘Sorry, we are just out of that part.”

- Norman Maclean, A River Runs Through It

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On a Ketchum memorial to Hemingway’s memory is an inscription that reads, “Best of all he loved the Fall/ The leaves yellow on the cottonwoods/ Leaves floating on trout streams/ And above the hills/ The high blue windless skies/ …. Now he will be part of them forever.” These are the words Ernest wrote about another Sun Valley Friend, Gene Van Guilder, for his funeral in 1939.

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The Longest Silence is a collection of 40 essays by Thomas McGuane.  It covers a lot of territory in the fly-fishing world from trout fishing in the Western Rivers of the United States to fishing for tarpon and permit in the waters of the Florida Keys to salmon fishing in Russia.  In these essays he contemplates the progression of the sport and how things like technology and the general competitive nature of our society may be eroding away some of the pleasurable elements of fishing, especially fly fishing, that are more esoteric.  His experience in fishing for saltwater species in the sixties and seventies before the sport gained more popularity helps show some of the progression of the sport to where it is today. 

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Albert Nofi presents a well written narrative of the Spanish American War of 1898.   It covers the usual colorful aspects of the war to include the infamous Rough Riders led by Teddy Roosevelt.  Most of what is written about this conflict is focused on the group of heroes that emerged from this conflict and went on to become famous in American Politics.  In this book Nofi also gives serious attention to describing the Spanish Army, the relic of an Empire in Decline, however still well trained and equipped.  It also covers the war in Puerto Rico which included some clever tactical maneuvering by the infamous Indian fighter Nelson A. Miles. It is a good read on the history of this important part of American History and gives some greater context than can be gained in other books I have read on the subject that have been primarily focused on Roosevelt and Leonard Wood.    

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