Out of Africa

A Danish noblewoman comes to Africa gets married to a Swedish Baron, her second cousin and starts a coffee plantation close to the Ngong Hills in the Kenyan Colony southwest of Nairobi then just a small town before the start of WWI. Isak Dinesen ( nee Karen Blixen) finds real love and tragedy while......more

An interesting collection of anecdotes from Africa in the early 1900s. It is better than a history book because you get to learn about it from the words of someone who lived it. The colonialism approach of the time that is seen in the writing can be construed as imperialistic and, at times, racially......more

Out of her experience of seventeen years managing a coffee plantation in Kenya, a Danish aristocrat crafted this brilliant and unforgettable memoir of two cultures meeting and (sometimes uneasily) coexisting. Karen Blixen wrote Out of Africa (1937) under the pen name of Isak Dinesen – one of a numbe......more

4 Stars for Out of Africa & Shadows on the Grass (audiobook) by Isak Dinesen (née Karen Blixen) read by Susan Lyons. This was an interesting look into what it was like to run a coffee plantation in Kenya in the 1930’s. The author tells us about her experiences interacting with the different local po......more

I start with the famous paragraph: "If I know a song of Africa, of the giraffe and the African new moon lying on her back, of the plows in the fields and the sweaty faces of the coffee pickers, does Africa know a song of me? Will the air over the plain quiver with a color that I have had on, or the c......more