Mary S. Lovell

The glamour of yesteryear is prominent in this book about the French Riviera in the first half of the twentieth century. Many famous figures make appearances - Winston Churchill, Aga Khan, Rita Hayworth - but the center is the Art Deco Château de l’Horizon, a villa owned by American socialite Maxine Elliot that hosted the rich and famous. This book makes for fun reading and I appreciated the details included about the lives of this glamorous social set, but it's certainly not a critical assessment of the wealth and social privilege within which these figures existed.… (more)

Beryl Markham's [West with the Night] is one of my all-time favorite books, and [[Mary Lovell]] made a career out of biographies of aviatrix from that time, so this was an easy choice. Lovell divides the stories up by who she speculates may have contributed to them, deciding the last few were, at best, collaborations between Markham and her husband or others. Interestingly, the earlier stories are the better of the bunch, suggesting that the collaborations may have done little more for Markham than obscure her own talents. All of the stories feature strong women; many feature aviation; and some feature horses - again cementing Markham's influence whether she wrote every word or not, and I'm betting she wrote them all only relying on her collaborators for editing.

The collection, and the individual stories, are not up to the quality of [West with the Night], but that shouldn't argue against reading the book if you're interested in Markham and her exploits. Lovell's interludes explaining the impetus for the stories and how they fit into Markham's life are worth the read alone.

4 bones!!!!
Recommended… (more)