She's particularly good at pointing up the differences between the native and the white way of thinking. The book tells of her life with the natives, the relationships which she developed with them and, as a counterpoint, her life as a white settler. Blixen was a remarkable and unconventional woman with attitudes far ahead of her time. But from the moment she saw the Ngong Hills ('Ngong' means 'knuckle', by the way, because of the arrangement of the four hills) she knew that her heart belonged to Africa. Karen Blixen left her native Denmark and come to Kenya to manage a coffee plantation in 1914 and she stayed there until it became obvious that growing coffee at that altitude was not economically viable and left in 1925.
I remember looking for this book at the time, but being unable to find it, so the opportunity to read it now was too good to miss. It wasn't just the story, but the personality of Karen Blixen and the wonderful landscape of the Ngong Hills, south of Nairobi, in Kenya's Rift Valley. It's more than a quarter of a century since I first saw the film Out of Africa and it's one of the few that have stayed with me over the intervening years. Summary: First published in 1937 but still fresh and relevant, this is the story of Karen's Blixen's life as a coffee farmer in Kenya in the first quarter of the twentieth century.
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