Reviews for The Daily Telegraph Ninth Crossword Puzzle Book

The average rating for The Daily Telegraph Ninth Crossword Puzzle Book based on 2 reviews is 4.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2011-08-22 00:00:00 Nektarios Christodoulakis Great stuff. Her memoir is from the early years of the Kenya colony � her parents� new farm was one of the first established in that area, and the hinterlands were still pretty much as they were before the Europeans arrived. As others have said, the highlight of the book is the flavor of the East Africa of a century ago: sights, sounds, smells, animals, people. She was a wonderful writer. Not to be missed, if you are interested in East Africa, or this era. The cover photo on the 2000 Penguin reprint, of the author, her Mom, and her pony around 1915, is a fine preview of her story. This is very nice country indeed. My parents lived in Kenya in the early 1970s. Their house was at 7000 ft., almost on the equator, so a near-perfect year-round climate. They had a view of Kilimanjaro from their front windows, and of Mt. Kenya from the back. This was an old British agricultural research station. You could see why the Brits didn�t want to give up their colony. Elspeth arrived in Kenya in late 1913 at age 6 1/2. She went back to England with her mother in (I think) 1915 or early 1916, after the beginning of WW1. She returned with her parents after the War, and left Kenya for good in 1925 to go to college in England. I�m pretty sure her memoirs are fictionalized to a degree � I don�t doubt she remembered the highlights, and perhaps her parents and/or neighbors kept diaries or journals � but her account of (e.g.) her neighbor Lettice carrying on an affair with a gallant young colonial would have been beyond the comprehension of a 7 year old girl, I think. She did become a well-regarded novelist. I read the book in the late 1970s, and it�s stuck with me. I�m reading a battered library copy of the 1959 first American edition, which arrived a few days before the libraries closed for the coronavirus emergency. Thika is now an industrial town of about 280,000 on the outskirts of Nairobi, served by an 8-lane superhighway, and the rest of the country has changed drastically too. Fortunately, Kenya has protected substantial areas of the country as National Parks and Preserves, some of which I�m familiar with from when my parents lived there. I haven�t been back, though I�ve long intended to.

Review # 2 was written on 2009-01-31 00:00:00 Georges Icke "The Flame Trees of Thika: Memories of an African Childhood" by Elspeth Huxley, is an absolutely lovely recollection of childhood as it should be for every child. The daughter of two financially strapped, adventurous, and eternally optimistic parents, Elspeth recounts life in Thika in the bush of Kenya, where she spent her youth amongst the Kikuyu and Masai. She lived with nature, with superstitions, with death and love, and certainly writes about it all with great equanimity. She is able to capture the way a child hovers around the fringe of certain events, yet seems to understand events with a certain unique wisdom. It is a wonderful book. The writing is excellent, the story actually quite amazing, and the people are fascinating, one and all. Read it!