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Green Hills of Africa (Scribner Classics) | 
 enlarge | Author: Ernest Hemingway
Publisher: Scribner
Category: Book
List Price: $25.00
Buy New: $15.59
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Avg. Customer Rating:  38 reviews
Sales Rank: 74695
Media: Hardcover
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 208
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1
Dimensions (in): 9.6 x 6.4 x 0.8
ISBN: 068484463X
Dewey Decimal Number: 813.52
EAN: 9780684844633
ASIN: 068484463X
Publication Date: April 15, 1998
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Shipping: International shipping available
Condition: Brand New, Perfect Condition, Please allow 4-14 business days for delivery. 100% Money Back Guarantee, Over 1,000,000 customers served.
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Product Description
"There are some things which cannot be learned quickly, and time, which is all we have, must be paid heavily for their acquiring. They are the very simplest things, and because it takes a man's life to know them the little new that each man gets from life is very costly and the only heritage he has to leave."-- ERNEST HEMINGWAY In the winter of 1933, Ernest Hemingway and his wife Pauline set out on a two-month safari in the big-game country of East Africa, camping out on the great Serengeti Plain at the foot of magnificent Mount Kilimanjaro. "I had quite a trip," the author told his friend Philip Percival, with characteristic understatement. Green Hills of Africa is Hemingway's account of that expedition, of what it taught him about Africa and himself. Richly evocative of the region's natural beauty, tremendously alive to its character, culture, and customs, and pregnant with a hard-won wisdom gained from the extraordinary situations it describes, it is widely held to be one of the twentieth century's classic travelogues.
Download Description
"There are some things which cannot be learned quickly, and time, which is all we have, must be paid heavily for their acquiring. They are the very simplest things, and because it takes a man's life to know them the little new that each man gets from life is very costly and the only heritage he has to leave." - ERNEST HEMINGWAY In the winter of 1933, Ernest Hemingway and his wife Pauline set out on a two-month safari in the big-game country of East Africa, camping out on the great Serengeti Plain at the foot of magnificent Mount Kilimanjaro. "I had quite a trip," the author told his friend Philip Percival, with characteristic understatement. Green Hills of Africa is Hemingway's account of that expedition, of what it taught him about Africa and himself. Richly evocative of the region's natural beauty, tremendously alive to its character, culture, and customs, and pregnant with a hard-won wisdom gained from the extraordinary situations it describes, it is widely held to be one of the twentieth century's classic travelogues.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 33 more reviews...
 not the best of hemingway's June 16, 2008
some highlights: the swahili word "m'uzuri" meaning good or well reminds hemingway of missouri. such classical hemingway wry humor. also, "simba" is another swahili word that i had the pleasure of learning in this book, which reminds ME of the disney beloved character, of course. (and jason raize, who played the adult simba on broadway who died tragically too young--look him up, people!)
the few pages in chapter one where hemingway met a guy in africa who has heard of hemingway from a lit magazine were excellent. it's hemingway pointing to the sources of great american writings. mark twain's huck topped this chart. moby-dick was mentioned, of course. and henry james (the "two most beautiful words in the english language" as the great--yet not really well known--american poet jim crenner says).
having stated all this, i think this is one of hemingway's weakest books i've ever read. his occasional incredibly long sentences that he does so breathtakingly, magnificently well in other books don't seem to live up to the golden standard that i've seen. the details of the hunt are bloody. bloody boring, that is, at some points.
this is hemingway's second attempt at non-fiction so i'd be interested in checking out his tome of a book on bull-fighting. tho, as any lover of hemingway's writings would know, my lukewarm reaction to "green hills" doesn't even put a tiny dent on my great admiration for this remarkable american writer.
p.s: i finished this book on friday the 13th, june 2008. and how many chapters are there? i love coincidences like this.
 my least favorite hemmingway book. June 22, 2007
1 out of 7 found this review helpful
this book is annoying. hemmingway's ego is out of control as he tries to make a big man of himself by shooting his way through an array of animals that of course mean him no harm at all. though i love much of his early work, this book makes him seem a truly horrible person. no wonder he had a long string of failed relationships and ultimatley killed himself. who could live with a jackass like this. in the end, he couldn't even stand to live with himself. this is an almost worthless book.
Hemingway's writing May 12, 2007
1 out of 3 found this review helpful
I found this writing less interesting than Rossevelt or Rourk work purchased at the same time. Perhaps the critics opinions are not always the best way to judge a work.
 He shoots everything including the Bull January 29, 2007
7 out of 8 found this review helpful
Hemingway once said that a writer needs a built-in- B.S. detector. He forgot to take it along on this safari, though he is willing to stand corrected occasionally by his then- wife Pauline for errors of 'diarrhea of the mouth'. In any case the old Hem style is truly at work here, and it supplies us with some truly beautiful and moving passages. It also supplies us with a capsule survey of American Literature as provided by the great Hem in which he finds Emerson, Thoreau and Whittier all mind and no body, Melville all rhetoric and and an imagined mystery not really there, and only Crane, Twain and James worth keeping. His most famous riff is of course the one in which he says all American Literature derives from a book called Huckleberry Finn which he then says is great to a certain point only. Old Hem in a wonderfully snobbish way tells us that America really has no literature and that we need someone with the discipline of Flaubert and the something else of Stendhal if we are to have one. No doubt he is the one who intends to supply the product.
With all the posturing and the big - game hunting shtantz and the bull which accompanies it( And with it too the morally objectionable chest- beating at cutting down unarmed rhinos, lions, kudu etc. Hemingway is at times here at the top of his game. He was young and strong and relatively happy and had already made it as a writer though perhaps not in the way he ultimately wanted to.
The dialogue between him and the other hunters is to my mind over-mannered stylized pretentious crap.
But there are passages in the book which remind you that this is one of the truly great American writers, and one of , in my judgment, the best short story writers of them all.
I want to cite a passage just to give the feeling of how good old Hem could be when he was good.
" What I had to do was work. I did not care, particularly , how it all came out. I did not take my own life seriously anymore, any one else's life , yes, but not mine. They all wanted something that I did not want and I would get it without wanting it, if I worked. To work was the only thing , it was the one thing that always made you feel good , and in the meantime it was my own damned life and I would lead it where and how I pleased. And where I led it now pleased me very much. This was a better sky than Italy. The hell, it was. The best sky was in Italy and Spain and Northern Michigan and in the fall in the Gulf off Cuba. You could beat this sky; but not the country."
 lacks luster January 17, 2007
5 out of 7 found this review helpful
Hemingway would have been better served by including more narratives than the ramblings of his characters. He seems to believe that it is important to capture what they actually said since they are real characters and not imaginary, but how realistic is that? Obviously, he couldn't write while hunting so undoubtedly he paraphrased their conversations when he was able to write - possibly days or weeks later. So if he's going to paraphrase then he should polish up the dialogue. And, perhaps exclude much of the pointless dribble. Some of which might not have been pointless if he had done a better job of developing the characters.
I do not recommend this book. Instead, I would rather point a potential reader of African safari stories to the works of Peter Capstick.
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