Hemingway in Africa

Africa was an obsession for Hemingway throughout his life. Long before he wrote "The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber" and The Green Hills of Africa, he had been enthralled as a ten-year-old by newspaper accounts of the African expedition undertaken in 1909 by his boyhood idol, Theodore Roosevelt. In writing Hemingway in Africa, Christopher Ondaatje, an explorer and adventurer himself, followed the trial of Hemingway's two major African safaris--through Kenya, Tanzania, and Uganda--and analyzed Hemingway's writings to uncover a startling amount of new material on this vitally important aspect of his life and work. Hemingway in Africa is lavishly illustrated with rarely seen period photos, including a photo of the actual leopard that inspired "The Snows of Kilimanjaro; " photos of mid-century Mombasa and Nairobi, and the wreckage of the 1954 plane crash near Murchison Falls that nearly claimed Hemingway's life. These are complemented by Ondaatje's own stunning photos of Masai tribe members, African wildlife, and the awe-inspiring landscape. Hemingway in Africa provides compelling insight into the mind of the author for whom dangerous exploits were "an effort to relieve the intensity of existing at the edge."