Scott Griffin’s book, My Heart is Africa, is one of those wonderful experiences in literature where, after reading it for the first time, you set it aside in a safe place, knowing that you will return to it again and again.
Three of my favorite authors are pilots. Most of their best work, in my opinion, is about their experiences flying.
Richard Bach, most famous for Jonathon Livingston Seagull, has written extensively about flying.
Antoine de Saint Exupéry, renowned for The Little Prince, also wrote several books about his experience as a pilot.
Third is Scott Griffin, businessman and philanthropist, most noted for the Griffin Poetry Prize, with his book, My Heart is Africa.
What all three authors have in common is their ability to describe to readers the reality of their experiences with clarity and honesty, conveying through it a deep sense of romanticism that comes not from what most associate with romanticism, such as idealism, love, or sentimentality, but from fully embracing their own lives and their own experiences. It is a shame, I think, that Hemingway never learned to fly.
The book is about Griffin’s experiences when he decided to leave the business world in 1996 and volunteer with the Flying Doctors Service, an African organization that flies doctors and nurses to remote regions of the continent where medical facilities are not available. A pilot himself, Griffin decided to use the opportunity to fly across the Atlantic and most of two continents himself from Toronto to Nairobi, in a small, single-engine Cessna 180. This is a feat few pilots would believe possible in a Cessna 180, let alone achievable.
The book begins with his departure from Newfoundland into the silent darkness above the Atlantic, dealing with faulty radio equipment, and the fears, doubts and exhilaration that one only experiences when his life is literally in his own hands. In Africa, Griffin provides us with first-hand accounts of dealing with government bureaucracy and NGO administrators, the financial poverty, and the riches of the souls who live and work and struggle in a land vastly foreign to the world he left behind.
He is joined by his wife, Krystyne, and leads us through their personal story, as soul-mates who rediscover each other through their two year journey in Africa.
My Heart is Africa, visit my store at Amazon.com
My Heart Is Africa: A Flying Adventure, by Scott Griffin
Published by House of Anansi Press Inc.,
272 pp.,
ISBN 088784748X
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{ 1 comment }
weird….i came across an entry of mine tonight from my time in south africa: “all our hearts belong to the beat in africa, whether we know it or not.”
will have to check out this book although i am sure i know a lot of what he has to say in re: bureaucracy etc.
annie
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