I will report the beginning of the book starts slow and picks up greatly in the second- half when the author reveals more about the local society with the complicated relationships between the various races inhabiting the area, the rulers and the ruled. The variety of African wildlife seen and heard amazes, insects also appear, millions of ravenous locust swarm and darken the skies no place like this on Earth especially in the 1920's, a sad memory of the past. Disasters come regularly and the intervals much too short, the intermission ends and the calamities begin again. Still a Somali worker her main servant Farah Aden indispensable, helps in her endeavors in the vast wilderness, lions roam and roar nearby constant danger to humans and their animals, which are many. Numerous native servants, some squatters the foreign lady has problems dealing with, strangely she's very popular treating them kindly, an amateur doctoring their illnesses unusual for those years, abandoned by her husband she alone must prevail. As the second son of a British Earl.well that says it all, the restless man will always be that. He a big- game hunter, flyer, the adventurer a lost soul escaping the restrictions of England for the freedom of a new untamed land, still never comfortable in, or anywhere else. Denys Finch Hatton a British aristocrat, Oxford educated oozing charm became her inevitable lover, she adoringly writes about but keeps the relationship unstated, but you can read between the lines.

These memoirs by the upper-class woman of her African experiences tells mostly the truth, the interesting stories with hidden secrets, after all this was published in 1937 and reputations needed to be protected, discretion ruled the age. At an elevation above 6,000 feet you can imagine the difficulties, a great place for coffee beans are at lower levels she will discover to her immense regret. The unfaithful husband Baron Bror Blixen neglects the Baroness and not interested in the farm, he enjoys the company of other women. Isak Dinesen ( nee Karen Blixen) finds real love and tragedy while managing it 1913-1931. 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.

Shadows on the grass isak dinesen