In the years when Africa remained for Europeans a romantic and formidable continent accessible only through accounts from colonists, Isak Dinesen (the Danish countess Karen Blixen) had the great good fortune to run a coffee plantation in Kenya. Also an Oscar-winning motion picture, this audiobook presents the portrait of a strong, determined, sensitive woman on whom a rich, dramatic landscape and way of life made deep impressions. Dinesen's love for Africa and the Africans who worked on her land is brought to life in an outstanding reading by Julie Harris. 2 cassettes.
Out of Africa
and over one million other books are available for Amazon Kindle.
Learn more
| ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Book Description
Editorial Reviews
Review
"This audiobook is stirring and remarkable." -- Kliatt, January 1992
From the Publisher
9 1.5-hour cassettes
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Product Details
Would you like to update product info or give feedback on images?
|
More About the Authors
Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.
Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
54 of 56 people found the following review helpful
Format:Hardcover
Isak Dinesen, nee Karen Blixen, lived in East Africa for almost twenty years making a living as the proprietor of a coffee plantation. Out of Africa is a memoir of her experiences there. But the book is so much more.
The stories are interesting to be sure. They relate to the plantation or the people and events that one way or another impacted her life there. But it is Blixen's writing that I found so sublime. I have never read anything like it. The way Blixen turns a phrase is both lyrical and enchanting all at once - you become literally swept up in the words and imagery. It is obvilious that Blixen loved Africa - something about the continent got under her skin. In a similar fashion her words have gotten under mine. I have read Out of Africa several times; each time I marvel at the beautiful language she uses. Read this book and I am sure you will feel the same way.
51 of 55 people found the following review helpful
Format:Hardcover
Isak Dinesen (Karen Blixen) has been elevated to star status by the feminists for her independent stance and courage, but don't read this book because of that. Don't look for the tragic story of her misguided marriage and the heartbreak and barrenness it brought her, or for descriptions of her love affair with adventurer Denys Finch-Hatton. None of that appears here.
Instead, "Out of Africa" is a storytelling book woven in the imaginative Danish style. Dinesen's finely tuned sensitivity is revealed here, as well as her (again typically Danish) well-developed gift for friendship with many kinds of people. In her case this gift extends to African animals as well, like Lulu, the beautiful gazelle who graced her plantation for years.
Her descriptions of the Kenya of her day are exquisitely written, factual and magical at the same time. Africa is the star of the book, not Dinesen herself, not the tribespeople or the colonials, not her struggles with raising coffee in land "a little too high", nor her political dealings with the government officials. Her writing evokes the Africa she knew well and loved deeply.
30 of 32 people found the following review helpful
Format:Hardcover
Forget the movie and read the book instead. Isak Dinesen's love for Africa and her adopted homeland shines through every page as she helps us to vicariously experience like on a Kenyan farm. The book is loosely plotted and Dinesen is not shy about expressing her personal views, so expect some opinionated writing from this lady. She doesn't romanticize Africa, as many writers do. She tells it like it is, which is great, as far as I'm concerned. If you're looking for King Solomon's Mines, foget it, but if you have any interest in Africa, past or present, you're sure to like this book.
Most Recent Customer Reviews
A beautiful paean to a bygone era
"Out of Africa" is not autobiographical. It is a response of Karen Blixen's soul to the African experience. Her writing is lovely, pure, unadorned by any superfluous words. Read more
Published 3 months ago by P. B. Sharp
Best book ever
Out of Africa by Karen Blixen is honestly one of the best books I have ever read! I've read many travel books, but this one eats the cake. Read more
Published 7 months ago by Michael B
I could smell Africa
While I have never been to Africa, through Isak Dinesen's words it did not take long for me to start smelling the country. From the coffee they have planted, to the dirt. Read more
Published 7 months ago by Meregwyn
Fascinating look at a different time
This reads more like a collection of short stories of things she remembers from having a coffee farm in Africa. They are true stories which makes it more interesting to me. Read more
Published 7 months ago by Jessica Ball
One of the Best Books Ever!
If you're expecting the book to be the same as the movie, you'll be disappointed. While scenes and moods from the book show up in the movie, the two are very different. Read more
Published 12 months ago by Anna D. Allen
Best book in Danish litterature ever!
This book will never be surpassed by another book from another Danish author. Karen Blixen's book is all the way up there among the best books ever written in the history of... Read more
Published 12 months ago by Rune Rindel Hansen
FAVORITE AUTHOR...EVER
Favorite author...ever. Favorite book...ever. If you don't think Isak Dinesen is the finest author, in at least one hundred years, then you simply don't understand. Read more
Published 12 months ago by Bay Buyer
Well-written group of vignettes -- nothing like the movie
Nothing like the movie, this book is really a collection of impressions and stories loosely connected. Her view is very nuanced, and she writes beautifully.
Published 15 months ago by E.J. Kaye
Beautiful prose
Famous lines are touted in English literature classes, lines that are remembered because of their interesting word choice or captivating quality. Read more
Published 15 months ago by Englishmajor97
Marvelous story telling set in Africa
Out of Africa is that rare book that once owned must continue to be read at different intervals throughout the years. Read more
Published 16 months ago by Connie J. Manning
Book Extras from Other Websites
This content may contain spoilers
Introduction (From Wikipedia)
Out of Africa is a memoir by Isak Dinesen, a pen name used by the Danish author Baroness Karen von Blixen-Finecke. The book, first published in 1937, recounts events of the seventeen years when Blixen made her home in Kenya, then British East Africa. The book is a lyrical meditation on Blixen’s life on her coffee plantation, as well as a tribute to some of the people who touched her life there. It is also a vivid snapshot of African colonial life in the last decades of the British Empire. Blixen wrote the book in English and then translated it into Danish.
Background (From Wikipedia)
- "I had a farm in Africa at the foot of the Ngong Hills..."
Karen Blixen moved to British East Africa in late 1913, at the age of 28, to marry her second cousin, the Swedish Baron Bror von Blixen-Finecke, and make a life in the British colony known today as Kenya. The young Baron and Baroness bought farmland in the Ngong Hills about ten miles (16 km) southwest of Nairobi, which at the time was still shaking off its rough origins as a supply depot on the Uganda Railway.
The Blixens had planned to raise dairy cattle, but Bror developed their farm as a coffee plantation instead. It was managed by Europeans, including, at the start, Karen’s brother Thomas – but most of the labor was provided by “squatters.” This was the colonial term for local Kikuyu tribespeople who guaranteed the owners 180 days of labour in exchange for wages and the right to live and farm on the uncultivated lands which, in many cases, had simply been theirs before the British arrived and claimed them.
When the First World War drove coffee prices up, the Blixen family invested in the business, and in 1917 Karen and Bror expanded their holdings to six thousand acres (24 km²). The new acquisitions included the site of the house which features so prominently in Out of Africa.
The Blixens’ marriage started well – Karen and Bror went on hunting safaris which Karen later remembered as paradisiacal. But it was not ultimately successful: Bror, a talented hunter and a well liked companion, was an unfaithful husband and a poor businessman. In 1921 the couple separated, and in 1925 they were divorced; Karen took over the management of the farm on her own.
She was well suited to the work – fiercely independent and capable, she loved the land and liked her native workers. But the climate and soil of her particular tract was not ideal for coffee-raising; the farm endured several unexpected dry years with low yields, and the falling market price of coffee was no help. The farm sank further and further into debt until, in 1931, the family corporation forced her to sell it. The buyer, Remi Martin, who planned to carve it into residential plots, offered to allow Blixen to stay in the house. She declined, and returned to Denmark.
Blixen moved back to the family’s estate of Rungstedlund and lived with her mother; there she took up again the writing career that she had begun, but abandoned, in her youth. In 1934 she published a fiction collection, Nine Tales, now known as Seven Gothic Tales, and in 1937 she published her Kenyan memoir, Out of Africa. The book’s title was likely derived from the title of a poem, "Ex Africa," she had written in 1915, while recuperating in a Danish hospital from her fight with syphilis. The poem’s title is probably an abbreviation of the famous ancient Latin adage (credited to sages from Aristotle to Pliny to Erasmus) Ex Africa semper aliquid novi, which translates as “Out of Africa, always something new.”
Themes (From Wikipedia)
At first glance much of the book, especially the section titled “From an Immigrant’s Notebook,” seems to be a string of loosely related episodes organized from Blixen’s memory, or perhaps from notes she made while in Africa (indeed, in one of the early chapters she describes discussing the beginning of her work on the book with her young cook Kamante).
A closer look, however, yields a more formal approach.
Trials
Blixen examines the details and ethical implications of two separate “trials.” The first is African: a gathering of tribesmen on her farm to adjudicate the case of a Kikuyu child who accidentally killed one playmate and maimed another with a shotgun. This process seems largely devoid of Western-style moral or ethical considerations: most of the energy expended in deliberations is directed at determining the proper amount of reparation the perpetrator’s father must pay, in livestock, to the families of the victims. Later, Blixen describes a British colonial criminal trial in Nairobi: the defendant is a European settler who is accused of causing, by intention or indifference, the death of a disobedient African servant named Kitosch. Blixen does not directly compare the two proceedings, but the contrasts are stark.
Contrasts and opposites
These two trials, separated by most of the bulk of the book, may also be part of a deeper exploration by Blixen into one of her pet notions: the “Unity” of contrasts. Perhaps her greatest elucidation of this idea comes in Shadows on the Grass, which she wrote thirty years after leaving Kenya:
Her life in Africa offered her no shortage of such contrasting dualities: town and country, dry season and rainy season, Muslim and Christian. But her most constant theme is the contrast of African and European.
Africans
Much of Blixen’s energy in Out of Africa is spent trying to capture for the reader the character of the Africans who lived on or near her farm, and the efforts of European colonists (herself included) to co-exist with them.
Although she was unavoidably in the position of landholder, and wielded great power over her tenants, Blixen was known in her day for her respectful and admiring relationships with Africans – a connection that made her increasingly suspect among the other colonists as tensions grew between Europeans and Africans. “We were good friends,” she writes about her staff and workers. “I reconciled myself to the fact that while I should never quite know or understand them, they knew me through and through.”
But Blixen does understand – and thoughtfully delineates – the differences between the culture of the Kikuyu who work her farm and who raise and trade their own sheep and cattle, and that of the Maasai, a volatile warrior culture of nomadic cattle-drovers who live on a designated tribal reservation south of the farm’s property. Blixen also describes in some detail the lives of the Somali Muslims who immigrated south from Somaliland to work in Kenya, and a few members of the substantial Indian merchant minority which played a large role in the colony’s early development.
Her descriptions of Africans and their behavior or customs sometimes employ some of the abrasive racial language of her time, but her portraits are unusually frank and accepting, and are generally free of the period’s European preconceptions of Africans as savages or simpletons. She saw in the ancient tribal customs a logic and dignity which many of her fellow colonists did not. Some of those customs, such as the valuation of daughters based on the dowry they will bring at marriage, seem ugly to Western eyes; Blixen’s voice in describing these traditions is largely free of judgment.
She was admired in return by many of her African employees and acquaintances, who saw her as a thoughtful and wise figure, and turned to her for the resolution of many disputes and conflicts.
Europeans
The other characters who populate Out of Africa are the Europeans – colonists as well as some of the wanderers who stopped in Kenya. Foremost among them is Denys Finch Hatton, who was for a time Blixen’s lover after her separation and then her divorce from her husband. Finch Hatton, like Blixen herself, was known to feel close to his African acquaintances – as, indeed, do virtually all of the Europeans for whom Blixen expresses real regard in Out of Africa.
Blixen limits most of her reflections to those Europeans who were her frequent or favorite guests, such as a man she identifies only as “Old Knudsen,” a down-and-out Danish fisherman who invites himself to take up residence on her farm, and then abruptly dies there.
Edward, Prince of Wales, also makes an appearance; his 1928 visit to the colony was an event of the utmost importance in Kenya’s aristocratic social circles (the Governor of the colony ordered the streets of Nairobi repaved for the occasion).
Attribution: The information appearing above in this tab is from Wikipedia:
Out of Africa. Amazon is not affiliated with, and neither endorses, nor is endorsed by Wikipedia or any of the authors who contributed to this article. The Wikipedia content may be available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License, version 3.0 or any later version, available at: CC BY-SA. Additional or other terms may apply. See Wikipedia Terms of Use for details.
Adaptations (From Wikipedia)
Sydney Pollack directed a film adaptation in 1985, starring Meryl Streep, Robert Redford and Klaus Maria Brandauer.
The film is less a direct adaptation of the book than it is a love story. Written by Kurt Luedtke and drawing heavily on two biographies of Blixen, it is a compressed chronological recounting of Blixen’s Kenyan years that focuses particularly on her troubled marriage and her affair with Finch Hatton. Some of Blixen’s more poetic narration and a few episodes from the book do appear in the film, such as Blixen’s work running supply wagons during the war, the farm’s fire and its financial troubles, and her struggles to find a home for her Kikuyu squatters. Most of the main characters are identified by their real names, though substantial liberties are taken with some of the details.
Out of Africa won seven Academy Awards, including Best Picture, Best Director and Best Screenplay Adaptation.
Attribution: The information appearing above in this tab is from Wikipedia:
Out of Africa. Amazon is not affiliated with, and neither endorses, nor is endorsed by Wikipedia or any of the authors who contributed to this article. The Wikipedia content may be available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License, version 3.0 or any later version, available at: CC BY-SA. Additional or other terms may apply. See Wikipedia Terms of Use for details.
See a problem with this content? Let us know
What Other Items Do Customers Buy After Viewing This Item?
Tags Customers Associate with This Product(What's this?)Click on a tag to find related items, discussions, and people.
|
Customer Discussions
|
This product's forum
Active discussions in related forums
Search Customer Discussions
|
Related forums
|
Listmania!
|
|
