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Name: Amazon.com: Too Close to the Sun: The Audacious Life and Times of Denys Finch Hatton: 9780812968927: Wheeler, Sara: Books
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Too Close to the Sun: The Audacious Life and Times of Denys Finch Hatton Paperback – Illustrated, July 14, 2009

by Sara Wheeler (Author)

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A champion of Africa, legendary for his good looks, his charm, and his prowess as a soldier, lover, and hunter, Denys Finch Hatton inspired Karen Blixen to write the unforgettable Out of Africa. Now esteemed British biographer Sara Wheeler tells the truth about this extraordinarily charismatic adventurer.

Born to an old aristocratic family that had gambled away most of its fortune, Finch Hatton grew up in a world of effortless elegance and boundless power. In 1910, searching for something new, he arrived in British East Africa and fell in love–with a continent, with a landscape, with a way of life that was about to change forever. In Nairobi, Finch Hatton met Karen Blixen and embarked on one of the great love affairs of the twentieth century. Intellectual equals, Finch Hatton and Blixen were genuine pioneers in a land that was quickly being transformed by violence, greed, and bigotry. Ever restless, Finch Hatton wandered into a career as a big-game hunter and became an expert bush pilot. Mesmerized all his life by the allure of freedom and danger, Finch Hatton was, writes Wheeler, “the open road made flesh.”

Editorial Reviews

Review

“What is it about these untamable men that makes them so alluring? . . . In Finch Hatton, [Sara] Wheeler has found the archetypal wanderer forced to straddle multiple worlds. He embodies the contradictions of the early modern age and, in some ways still, of ours.”—New York Times Book Review

“A fascinating portrait of . . . a singularly romantic life.”—Vogue

“Highly recommended . . . Wheeler’s striking descriptions of East Africa, including Kenya and the Rift Valley, create a rich sense of place and time.”—Library Journal

“Wheeler’s fascinating, witty bio reveals her wonderful eye for telling details.”—Entertainment Weekly

About the Author

Like Denys Finch Hatton, Sara Wheeler was educated at Brasenose College, Oxford. Her books include Terra Incognita: Travels in Antarctica; Travels in a Thin Country; and Cherry: A Life of Apsley Cherry-Garrard, all available from the Modern Library. When not traveling, Wheeler lives with her family in London.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Chapter One

OUT OF TRIM

I saw him first fingering a pistol in a Nairobi gun-shop, with the casual interest that men of action will show for such toys, and well I liked the look of his scholarly appearance, which had also about it the suggestion of an adventurous wanderer, of a man who had watched a hundred desert suns splash with gilt the white-walled cities of Somaliland. —llewelyn powys, Black Laughter, 1925 When he heard that denys finch hatton had been killed on the plains of Africa, Alan Parsons reflected that his friend had been “like one of his forefathers of Elizabethan days—a man of action and a man of poetry.” It was the first Sir Christopher Hatton who had raised the family to the sunlit uplands of the English aristocracy, and they languished there through the pleasant centuries while their nation prospered. Denys inherited the charm of his Elizabethan ancestor, but not his taste for the gilded baits of conventional success. A Northamptonshire man, ruffed and sharp-bearded, Sir Christopher had worked his way into court and dazzled Queen Elizabeth with his dancing. She showered him with money and honors until he was Lord Chancellor. At thirty-five, he was able to purchase Kirby Hall in East Northamptonshire, one of the great Elizabethan houses, a model of proportion replete with cupolas, pergolas, and ninety-two fireplaces. But Sir Christopher had many mansions, and for five years he was too busy to visit Kirby. By the time Denys was born three centuries later, the family was heading in the other direction (down), as his uncle George, the eleventh Earl of Winchilsea, had gambled away several fortunes. After disposing of most of the family paintings, he sold the lead from the roof of Kirby Hall. His widowed stepmother, meanwhile, was quietly bringing up three sons and a daughter at Haverholme Priory in Lincolnshire. Frances “Fanny” Rice became the tenth earl’s third wife in 1849; their second son, Henry Stormont, was Denys’s father. At Haverholme, Henry and his siblings grew to love the pared-down landscape and the winds that sped across the flatlands freighted with the chill of the North Sea. The three boys went out with their uncles, shooting partridge in the gravel pits, pigeons in Evedon Wood, and rabbits everywhere. They caught pike up and down the Slea and dace in the section between Haverholme Lock and Cobbler’s Lock, and played golf and cricket in the park. (In the untroubled 1860s, the Priory had its own cricket team.) After boarding school Henry went up to Balliol, the Oxford college favored by the ancestral earls. At nineteen, his hollow-cheeked Renaissance face was framed by sideburns the color of sweet sherry. His nose was long and sharp, his eyes deep-set, and a prehensile mustache dipped and clung to his chin below his lower lip. Finch Hattons were speculators and adventurers. By the 1870s, young men from the landed gentry had started heading south to Australia—many were hired as jackaroos on the cattle stations—and after a year Henry gave up on Balliol and steamed to the subtropical northern tip of Queensland. He rode a horse down to Mackay, a huddle of shacks quietly sweltering among the sugar plantations 150 miles north of the Tropic of Capricorn. There he joined a maternal uncle who had sailed to Australia six years earlier. Knowing little of sugar, the pair determined to set themselves up as stockmen, and reconnaissance took them to the well-watered cattle country around Mount Spencer, forty-five miles inland. They purchased four hundred square miles of bush, at first sleeping on canvas stretchers in a hut overlooking a lagoon. Henry had a table for his tin basin and a fragment of looking glass balanced on a pair of nails driven into a post. At night, he read in the sallow glow of a fat-filled jam tin wicked with a twist of tweed from his trousers. The lure of the frontier was in the blood, and within a year Henry’s younger brother, Harold, had arrived in Queensland to assist the fledgling family firm. On his first night, he found an eleven-foot carpet snake coiled in his cot bed. But it would have taken more than a snake to deter Harold, a figure of buttonholing vigor and the most voluble of the Finch Hattons. With his brother and his uncle, he turned Mount Spencer into a comfortable village of houses and huts, and the station into a going concern with twelve thousand cattle and a permanent staff of stockmen and boys. It was hard work all around. Simply chopping timber for fences was a Sisyphean task that involved pulling a crosscut saw and swinging a maul under a vertical sun, the thermometer often reaching 110 degrees in the shade. “But if a man is thoroughly sound,” Harold wrote, “. . . it is odd if he does not look back to the time when he was splitting rails for ten hours a day as the happiest in his life.” A man with a powerful sense of public duty, Harold was quickly appointed a Queensland magistrate and later became the voice of judicial authority at the goldfields, granting (or, more often, refusing) alcohol licenses. He was a model of moral seriousness and egregious self-confidence—an imperial beau idéal.* In his spare time, he learned to throw the boomerang; he included this among his achievements in Who’s Who (“only white man who could ever throw the boomerang like the blacks of Australia”). He never married. In later years, he was close to his nephews and nieces, and Denys, the youngest, worshipped his uncle Harold, the archetypal man of action. Denys loved hearing stories of the magnificent landscapes, dizzying scale, and hazards innumerable that characterized the pioneering experience of the white men who battled the Australian bush in the last decades of the nineteenth century. For those made of the right material, it was a Garden of Eden. Thirty-five years later, Denys was to find a similar paradise on the plains of East Africa. DENYS’S MATERNAL GRANDMOTHER, Helen, had married Admiral of the Fleet Sir Henry Codrington, KC, in 1849. His father had captained the Orion at Trafalgar. After fifteen years of marriage, the admiral sued for divorce on the grounds of his wife’s multiple adulteries. The Codringtons had been living in Malta, where Sir Henry held the position of admiral-superintendent of the dockyard. Since its acquisition in 1814, Malta had been one of the great British naval bases and the home of the Royal Navy’s Mediterranean fleet. Perks of the job included a high-specification gondola, and at the divorce trial in London the gondolier testified that when Lady Codrington was escorted home by a certain officer he regularly observed his vessel “getting out of trim” due to excessive movement in the cabin. Day after day, jurors heard a litany of alleged activities, including a lesbian affair and flights from private detectives—all subsequently recounted in minute detail in the pages of The Times. It was the soap opera of the moment, and through the dog days of summer in 1864 the denizens of the Establishment gasped for the next installment. The admiral, suggested Lady Codrington in a robust counterattack, had once entered her bedchamber and groped her lady companion. Lawyers read out copious extracts from diaries and letters and, in his summing-up to the jury, the judge expressed his concern that they should not be influenced by the sheer number of charges brought against Lady Codrington—“so many imputations of criminal intercourse . . . all more or less sustained by evidence.” He pointed out that even a thousand weak links did not make a strong chain. But the jurors thought the links were strong enough, and on November 23 they found Lady Codrington guilty. Her daughters, Denys’s mother, Anne—known as Nan—and her sister, Nell, were eleven and ten. The admiral got his decree nisi. But the verdict was disputed, and, to the delight of the nation, the case rolled on. Like one of the admiral’s ships in full sail, it took a long time to stop. The two little girls, meanwhile, were shunted among relations, friends, and governesses, absorbed enough in the private world of childhood but uneasily aware of the hostilities that lay beyond its frontiers. Their mother had emerged from her husband’s testimony as a figure of lewd vulgarity. In reality, Helen Codrington, hemmed in by an existence over which she had no control, had chosen the only means of self-renewal available to her. She could not leave, so she tried to make staying tolerable; it was her way of seeking a better world. The affair was never spoken of in the family, even after many years. Denys never knew his grandmother; she died before he was born. It was a pity, as in him she would have found an ally at last. He had her affinity for waywardness, and his heart, too, never settled. HENRY FINCH HATTON met Nan Codrington when he returned from Australia on leave in 1879. Three years later, when both were thirty, they married. The bride had copper pre-Raphaelite hair, aspirin-white skin, and large gray eyes that sheltered under broad red brows. Her friends were artists and musicians, and she brought a gentle bohemian glamour to the closed and traditional Winchilsea clan. She was intimate with Ellen Terry, an actress of the grand manner who had won the country’s heart during her twenty-four-year stage partnership with Sir Henry Irving. Known to her circle as Nellie, Terry was five years older than Nan and devoted to her—a stream of genuine affection plain to see amid the thespian gush. In her memoirs, Nellie said that once, as she was preparing to play Beatrice in a new production of Much Ado About Nothing, she “began to ‘take soundings’ from life for my conception of her. I found in my friend Anne Codrington what I wanted. There was before me a Beatrice—as fine a lady as ever lived, a great-hearted woman, beautiful, accomplished, merry, tender. When Nan Codrington came into the room, the sun came out.” Many would later note the same ineffable specialness in Nan’s son Denys. John Craigie, a university friend, recalled in old age, “He has remained with me as an almost unique personality. Completely fearless, he showed kindness in all his deeds. A king among men, he never did an unworthy action.” Eleven months after their marriage, and by now back in Australia, Henry and Nan had a daughter. The proud parents could not agree on a name, so the infant was christened Gladys Margaret, names never liked by anybody, with the result that she was known, from the outset, as Topsy. Two and a half years later, a son was born: Guy Montagu George, always known as Toby. The expanding family returned to England, and there Henry and his elder brother Murray focused on their bank balance. “Everything in the family financially at as critical a point as can be imagined,” Henry wrote in his diary on January 1, 1887. The large sums that should have been available had been dissipated by their half brother, George, the eleventh earl (he had found a fresh source of revenue at the pawnshop, where he deposited his wife’s jewelry). In addition, rents nationally had fallen by a quarter between the mid-seventies and the mid-eighties, denting the income of the entire landed class. The family business in Australia had failed to bring in money and now descended into crisis. Harold, the boomerang-throwing third brother, had returned from Queensland in 1883 and embarked on a financial career in the City, so he was unable to go back to try to salvage at least some of the initial investment. It was agreed that Henry should return to Australia alone “to see to things.” This was a difficult decision, as Nan was pregnant again. She and the two children were to live in rented accommodations in London until the new baby arrived, then move up to a property on the Haverholme estate in Lincolnshire. It was a typical Finch Hatton plan; the compulsion to move house bordered on the pathological. In February 1887, Henry moved his brood into 22 Prince of Wales Terrace, a new town house in a Kensington cul-de-sac that he had taken at six guineas a week until the end of May. Haverholme Priory had to be tenanted. “Alack, HP is a thing of the past,” Henry wrote in his diary the day the maids unpacked the trunks. But it wasn’t. He held on to Haverholme for another forty years. When he really did have to let it go, the grief of it killed him. On March 9, Henry left England, comforting himself on the steamer with Thompson’s History of the Paraguayan War. Almost as soon as he arrived in Queensland, he realized that the financial prognosis was disastrous. Back in the 1870s, he and Harold had started a mining company in addition to the cattle station. Since the California rush of 1849–50, the prospector had been a familiar figure on the imperial landscape. When a vigilant opportunist from New South Wales recognized, in the Californian seams, rock formations similar to those at home, he returned to the mountains of his youth, found a mine, and triggered the Australian gold rush. After yellowy glints were spotted in a creek running off Mount Britten, on the western fall of the coastal range, Harold and Henry sank money into a mill at the diggings. With land in England no longer a gold mine—even without a gambling earl—the Finch Hattons were speculating on any possible fresh source of income. But Henry returned to find that all efforts to float the company had failed. “No sale is possible now at almost any price,” he concluded. It was not all bad news that year. Back in Prince of Wales Terrace, baby Denys was born on April 24, 1887. His eyes were topsoil-brown, and he was long. The news reached his father by cable sixteen days later. “Hurrah at last!” Henry wrote in his diary that night. “No words to express the relief and delight.” But Henry was suffering from rheumatism in his shoulder and a bad case of homesickness. “My darling Nan,” he wrote on August 15, after receiving the mail, “I thank everything [sic] seems cosy and happy . . . I do long for her so dreadfully.” Although his rheumatism turned into sciatica (“Never had so much torture in my life”), Henry managed to keep up his fishing trips, got in a spot of possum shooting, and even had a pop at the cockatoos. He was glad to see the back of the year, notwithstanding the acquisition of another son. “So ends 1887, and I hope 1888 may have more luck in store for us all,” he wrote in his diary on December 31. “It’s been a vile year for me on the whole, away from home and bothered with station affairs and minor anxieties—and mostly alone.” Then, on June 15, he learned by cable that his gambling half brother, George, had died at the age of seventy-two. “Poor dear old W. [Winchilsea],” Henry wrote in his diary. “I hope he knew how fond of him we all were. But he was always thinking we must hate him for ruin brought on the family by him.

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Random House Publishing Group; Reprint edition (July 14, 2009)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 336 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0812968921
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0812968927
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 8 ounces
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.23 x 0.73 x 7.96 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #330,444 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #72 in Historical African Biographies (Books)
- #1,334 in Traveler & Explorer Biographies
- #2,536 in Military Leader Biographies

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Customers find this book to be a wonderful read that is thoroughly researched and informative, with one customer noting how it closes gaps in the factual record. Moreover, the story receives positive feedback for being a true adventure, and customers appreciate its exquisite style and character development. However, the writing quality receives mixed reviews, with some finding it nicely written while others describe it as nearly unreadable.

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28 customers mention "Readability"28 positive0 negative

Customers find the book to be a wonderful and interesting read.

"...This book is noteworthy, primarily because Sara Wheeler writes very well with a wckedly surprising and dry sense of humor...." Read more

"...is not worth the price of a permanent hardcopy, but reasonable as a used "one-off" read...." Read more

"...Other than that it was first class for me...." Read more

"...A good book to to take you away from your ordinary life." Read more

27 customers mention "Information quality"24 positive3 negative

Customers find the book informative and well-researched, describing it as a magnificent biography that provides excellent summaries.

"...him out although this thorough biography tries hard and presents a great deal of information. The real Denys is still elusive...." Read more

"...Wheeler is a great nature writer, also, and a fantastic describer of The Great War in Africa...." Read more

"...One advantage to reading these books is that they provide some background understanding for many of the scenes in the film, for instance why Meryl..." Read more

"...loved Out of Africa-- the book or movie-- you will love this beautifully-researched and written biography of the last of the great white hunters &..." Read more

22 customers mention "Story quality"22 positive0 negative

Customers find the book's story engaging, describing it as a true adventure with good background information, and one customer notes it provides fascinating insight into the period before and after World War I.

"...primarily because Sara Wheeler writes very well with a wckedly surprising and dry sense of humor...." Read more

"...Beautifully described scenery, tense hunting situations and constant cocktails parties at dusk bring the lost privileges of British aristocracy to..." Read more

"...and a tour of Blixen's house, the pages of this book gave it a living history quality...." Read more

"...I thought it was too good to be true - he is so fascinating, and so mysterious, in Blixen and Markham's memoirs that it's hard to read them..." Read more

9 customers mention "Pacing"9 positive0 negative

Customers appreciate the pacing of the book, with one review noting how it brings characters to life, while another describes it as unapologetic.

"...privileged aristocrat who seemed to have everything: good looks, charm, adored by men and women alike...." Read more

"...Self indulgent, unapologetic, and a pure outdoorsman, F-H is an interesting man, not likable though. Except by the gifted Karen Blixen." Read more

"...Beryl Markham whose prose approaches poetry in the detached, evocative way she writes, though some say it was ghost written by her husband, no matter..." Read more

"...Wheeler also imparts the reader with a keen appreciation for the physical, financial, and emotional struggles endured by twentieth century European..." Read more

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Customers enjoy the book's content about Africa, with one customer describing it as soul food for Africaphiles, while another appreciates its fantastic descriptions of The Great War in Africa.

"...Wheeler is a great nature writer, also, and a fantastic describer of The Great War in Africa...." Read more

"This book brings the period and the people to life and elaborates the Out of Africa novel...." Read more

"I enjoyed this book immensely. Enjoy reading about the realities of Africa and the challenges the great white hunters faced...." Read more

"Well written. A fascinating look at East Africa in the early 1900's. Finch Hatton is far more interesting than Dinsen describes. Great read." Read more

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Customers appreciate the book's style, with one mentioning its stunning visuals and another noting its reasonable portrayal of Wheeler.

"...earl, a highly privileged aristocrat who seemed to have everything: good looks, charm, adored by men and women alike...." Read more

"...enjoyed most about this book was the trip to Kenya and the stunning visuals it provided...." Read more

"Great Characters, A Great Time To Be Alive and the most beautiful setting the eye can behold . Oh Yes, I Almost Forgot ...." Read more

"...Wheeler writes beautifully; she has an exquisite style...." Read more

4 customers mention "Character development"4 positive0 negative

Customers appreciate the character development in the book, with one noting how it clarifies the romanticized characters.

"Great Characters, A Great Time To Be Alive and the most beautiful setting the eye can behold . Oh Yes, I Almost Forgot ...." Read more

"...biography closes the gaps in the factual record and clarifies the romanticized characters found in Karen Blixen's autobiography, Out of Africa...." Read more

"Nicely written, well researched, great insight into a little known character from a by-gone era. Refreshing read." Read more

"These characters were larger than life. Very well written and well researched." Read more

28 customers mention "Writing quality"15 positive13 negative

Customers have mixed opinions about the writing quality of the book, with some finding it nicely written while others describe it as nearly unreadable and badly wordy.

"...farm but she achieved immortality through the majesty and beauty of her writing. "Out of Africa" is sublime...." Read more

"...There are no diaries and very, very few letters. My burning questions were: What is the interior world of a charming, dashing adventurer like?..." Read more

"...This book is noteworthy, primarily because Sara Wheeler writes very well with a wckedly surprising and dry sense of humor...." Read more

"...I found Wheeler's Travels in a Thin Country to be nearly unreadable. Why did I think this book would be any better?..." Read more

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P. B. Sharp
An accomplished man with few accomplishments
Reviewed in the United States on October 28, 2011
Verified Purchase

Denys Finch Hatton was the second son of an earl, a highly privileged aristocrat who seemed to have everything: good looks, charm, adored by men and women alike. Denys' family could trace their ancestry back to Sir Christopher Hatton, Queen Elizabeth's courtier. However his personal claim to fame teeters on a very flimsy base: he was the lover (among others) of two famous women- Isak Dinesen (Karen Blixen) and Beryl Markham, British East Africa's literary doyennes. Without "Out of Africa" and "West with the Night" Denys would long ago have disappeared, plowed under by the bulldozer of history. It is almost impossible to flesh him out although this thorough biography tries hard and presents a great deal of information. The real Denys is still elusive. It is difficult to appreciate just what it was that made him so universally acclaimed and to this reader, at least, he remains an enigma.

Too close to the sun refers, of course, to the flight of the Greek Icarus whose father Daedalus crafted for his son feathered wings soldered together with wax. The young man in exhilaration flew so close to the sun that the wax melted and he plummeted to his death.The title of Wheeler's biography is very pertinent to the life of Denys Finch Hatton. The metaphor of the book title is that Denys had the opportunity and talent to achieve success and fame from his own merits and efforts, but instead he only lives on in the works of others. And of course his plane crashes, like Icarus plunging to earth, his wings destroyed

Denys was languid and totally without ambition, not competitive although he did hate losing a game such as chess. His inheritance and social standing, even in British East Africa, allowed him to rub shoulders with the moneyed, titled class of British colonists. The British ex- patriots took their class distinctions right to BEA (later Kenya).As an aristocrat he could hobnob with the titled as could Karen Blixen by virtue of her title, Baroness

A great deal of background information is provided in the book such as descriptions of Denys' family and his activities in Africa during World War I. But let us cut to the chase and introduce Tania, Denys' name for Karen Blixen. Although several reviewers have remarked upon author Wheeler's dislike for Tania, I felt that Wheeler's portrait is quite reasonable. She describes Tania as "neurotic" and without a sense of humor. Tania considered her life a performance and wanted to be the heroine of every scene, having a high regard for her own importance and her own place. She may have loved her native servants but Wheeler remarks that her Africans were actually extensions of the African landscape.

Nobody would describe Tania as easy to get along with but "Out of Africa" and her short stories propelled her into a plane far above Denys Finch Hatton : she was not Icarus, her wings got singed but she kept them intact. She lost Denys and she lost her African farm but she achieved immortality through the majesty and beauty of her writing. "Out of Africa" is sublime. Her biggest mistake as regards her relationship with Denys was that she became too possessive. Denys wanted total freedom with no restraints and Karen's clutching of him drove him right into the arms of Beryl Markham , a notorious bed-hopper who wanted freedom to do whatever she wanted, just like Denys. Author Wheeler describes the relationship of Tania and Finch Hatton as being like two beaters of a rotary whisk that spin and never touch, an extraordinary metaphor that seems spot on.

Author Wheeler excuses any faults and eccentricities of Denys but she does not excuse Karen Blixen. Tania was very strange, very outré and at times could act ludicrously. Her servants had to wear white gloves when serving dinner and she and Denys dressed for dinner even when they were alone. That Tania adored Denys there is no doubt but did he adore her? No. She was convenient, her house was convenient and although he surely enjoyed her company as long as she didn't try and ensnare him into a permanent relationship (marriage) things went well. However, he could be cruel. The two lovers had a code for any future child of theirs -Daniel. When Denys was away. Tania was sure she was expecting and wired him. He replied "Strongly urge you cancel Daniel's visit."* In other words, get an abortion.

Although others have described Denys as a "Renaissance Man" he did not achieve enough to earn that description. He was a big game hunter, consorted with the Prince of Wales, and Kermit Roosevelt and other wealthy safari clients. Perhaps his greatest achievement was his attempt to interest clients in photographing the wildlife rather than shooting it. Not exactly an over-whelming achievement.

Wheeler's biography is very well written in a distinctive style. But I found myself skipping chapters to get to the meat of the biography- Karen Blixen. That is not the fault of the author, it's just that Denys without Tania, or Beryl Markham for that matter, doesn't interest me.

*Denys'wire has been disputed as no record of it now exists. Judith Thurman mentions it in her book "Isak Dinesen". It does seem out of character that Denys would wire anything so hurtful to his lover or to anyone for that matter.

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jean chases
Is It Enough To Be Charming?
Reviewed in the United States on August 8, 2014
Verified Purchase
I became addicted to Isak Dinesen after reading Judith Thurman's comprehensive biography of her. And, I just had to, also, read more about Denys Finch Hatton, Dinesen's main love interest.

This book is noteworthy, primarily because Sara Wheeler writes very well with a wckedly surprising and dry sense of humor. This is the main reason to read this biography, Sara Wheeler's writing skill. ( Wheeler is a great nature writer, also, and a fantastic describer of The Great War in Africa. Just a part of Finch Hatton's life but a part that Wheeler brings to vivid life.) She then constructs Finch Hatton's life out of thin air, as they say.

There's not much to Finch Hatton's life story for Wheeler to grab onto because he died young and left little in the way of letters and papers. He seems, though, to have charmed most he met, seems to have been a good casual friend and was just settling down in his forties when he died. ( Note that he had drawn a will before he died, but he left nothing to Dinesen--even though he knew she was losing her farm. This says a lot about his life, his maturity in an age when people were supposed to be grown up at an earlier age than we .)

Read this book to round out your knowledge of the 1920s and 1930s, especially in Africa's British colonies.

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Randy E. Lawrence
wonderful read and an in-depth…
Reviewed in the United States on February 11, 2023
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…crawl through the life and times of a truly memorable set of characters - Tania, Blix, Denys, the Prince of Wales, Kermit, Galbreath, Farah, and Beryl (“NOT your run-of-the-mill-Circe).

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MH
Wild English Animals in Africa
Reviewed in the United States on August 11, 2015
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Some of the most untamed creatures in the region of Africa in the early 20th century were the European settlers and the British holidayers. Beautifully described scenery, tense hunting situations and constant cocktails parties at dusk bring the lost privileges of British aristocracy to power again. Self indulgent, unapologetic, and a pure outdoorsman, F-H is an interesting man, not likable though. Except by the gifted Karen Blixen.

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PARIZOT Hélène
Splendid
Reviewed in France on December 3, 2015
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Très bel anglais, un réel plaisir à lire, de l'humour. Non seulement la vie de Finch Hatton et ses relations avec Karen Blixen mais replacée dans le cadre social, politique et économique de l'Angleterre de l'époque. Passionnant, de la très belle ouvrage.

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Robin Swift
Denys & Kenya
Reviewed in Australia on March 23, 2021
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A remarkable and deeply fascinating biography of Denys Finch-Hatton with a wide geographical coverage of Kenya and an extraordinary use of words I’ve never seen before.

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brian boyes
"BEST BOOK I HAVE EVER BEEN PRIVILEGED TO READ"....!!!!!!
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on September 23, 2018
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If I was only allowed to read one more book in my life, "Too Close to The Sun" would be the book...without any doubt.!!! This very special scribe is a blue print of what we all try to aspire too in life. It is set in the early 20th Century and through the prism of the central character we can with our own eyes learn to appreciate nature in the raw, gallantry, decency and self preservation.

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GT
FASCINATING BOOK ABOUT FASCINATING ERA
Reviewed in Canada on January 27, 2022
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Quite an adventure story! One of the most well-written books I ever read: brings the imagery and magic of Africa to life. Use a dictionary when you read it, however - the author has a huge and precise vocabulary and does not hesitate to employ it!

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DIDIER A.
R.A.S.
Reviewed in France on February 2, 2020
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R.A.S.

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Too Close to the Sun: The Audacious Life and Times of Denys Finch Hatton Paperback – Illustrated, July 14, 2009

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5.0 out of 5 stars An accomplished man with few accomplishments

4.0 out of 5 stars Is It Enough To Be Charming?

5.0 out of 5 stars wonderful read and an in-depth…

5.0 out of 5 stars Wild English Animals in Africa

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5.0 out of 5 stars Splendid

5.0 out of 5 stars Denys & Kenya

5.0 out of 5 stars "BEST BOOK I HAVE EVER BEEN PRIVILEGED TO READ"....!!!!!!

5.0 out of 5 stars FASCINATING BOOK ABOUT FASCINATING ERA

5.0 out of 5 stars R.A.S.

An accomplished man with few accomplishments

Is It Enough To Be Charming?

wonderful read and an in-depth…

Wild English Animals in Africa

Splendid

Denys & Kenya

"BEST BOOK I HAVE EVER BEEN PRIVILEGED TO READ"....!!!!!!

FASCINATING BOOK ABOUT FASCINATING ERA

R.A.S.