Too Close to the Sun: The Audacious Life and Times of Denys Finch Hatton

• 

• Author: Sara Wheeler
• Publisher: Random House
• Publication Date: April 24, 2007
• Format: Deckle Edge
• Condition: New

• Price: $11.35

Product Description

• Product Description

  Denys Finch Hatton was adored by women and idolized by men. A champion of Africa, legendary for his good looks, his charm, and his prowess as a soldier, lover, and hunter, Finch Hatton inspired Karen Blixen to write the unforgettable stories in 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. Tall and graceful, with the soul of a poet and an athlete’s relaxed masculinity, he became a hero without trying at Eton and Oxford. In 1910, searching for novelty and danger, Finch Hatton 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.
  
  Wheeler brilliantly conjures the mystical beauty of Kenya at a time when teeming herds of wild animals roamed unmolested across pristine savannah. No one was more deeply attuned to this beauty than Finch Hatton–and no one more bitterly mourned its passing when the outbreak of World War I engulfed the region in a protracted, bloody guerrilla conflict. Finch Hatton was serving as a captain in the Allied forces when he met Karen Blixen in Nairobi and embarked on one of the great love affairs of the twentieth century.
  
  With delicacy and grace, Wheeler teases out truth from fiction in the liaison that Blixen herself immortalized in Out of Africa. Intellectual equals, bound by their love for the continent and their inimitable sense of style, 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; his passion that led to his affair with the notoriously unconventional aviatrix Beryl Markham. But Markham was no more able to hold him than Blixen had been. Mesmerized all his life by the allure of freedom and danger, Finch Hatton was, writes Wheeler, “the open road made flesh.”
  
  In painting a portrait of an irresistible man, Sara Wheeler has beautifully captured the heady glamour of the vanished paradise of colonial East Africa. In Too Close to the Sun she has crafted a book that is as ravishing as its subject.

Customer Reviews

• July 20, 2010Great read.

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

• April 11, 2010If you loved Out of Africa...

  If you 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 & safari guides. More than a biography of the man, it is a biography of an entire aristocratic way of life: the non-inheriting son who must find his way in the world. In Denys' case, it led to the Happy Valley of Kenya at the pak of the Pax Britania. Denys was among the first to value and respect the indigenous people and tribes of Africa, and his premature death between the wars presaged much of the wasted promise and potential of his generation.

• August 2, 2009Not Close Enough

  Having lived in Kenya, I looked forward to Sarah Wheeler's book. Her tremendous research is apparent in the loving care afforded to specific details, especially concerning the early settlers in Kenya. I very much enjoyed the historical backdrop which gave context to behaviors and attitudes. However, Ms. Wheeler's view of Finch-Hatton is almost hagiographic. When the word "selfish" is floated in connection with his seemingly aloof response to Karen Blixen, Ms. Wheeler immediately counters with its romantic counterpart "elusive." She claims that this "elusiveness" was part of Finch-Hatton's charm and his attractiveness for women. I also have to agree with another reviewer; Karen Blixen is virtually excoriated throughout a good deal of this book. Ms. Wheeler's conclusions may be the result of interviews with Blixen's and Finch-Hatton's families. However, the trashing of Ms. Blixen's fiction seems particularly uncharitable and subjective. From this book, it appears that Finch-Hatton was the result of a pampered childhood and early schooling at Eton where he never recovered from being an "adored tyrant", and felt unable to "engage" with anything or anyone despite the devotion of many friends and lovers. Ms. Wheeler appears to agree with Beryl Markham who states that Finch-Hatton "was a great man who never achieved arrogance." However, Finch-Hatton seems more reminiscent of Henry James' John Marcher in "Beast in the Jungle" who waits for some great life-defining event to take place. Unlike Marcher, Finch-Hatton may never have understood that he allowed his life to slip away from him.

• July 29, 2009Doesn't live up to the hype

  I picked up this book with great anticipation. Out of Africa had intriqued me, and West with the Night was an interesting read. I found it difficult to get into Too CLose to the Sun. The author just didn't hold my interest. Lots of history, but that's ok. I'm a history buff, but history can't just be a telling of facts particularly in a biography. I realize Denys Finch Hatton left much to the imagination. There isn't a lot of material an author can draw from. There are no people left that can be interviewed, but if an author sets out to write a biography there has to be something there to hold my interest, something to get me into the story. Indeed there has to be a story, not just dull information.
  This book was just not what I was looking for.

• August 5, 2008NOT WHAT I EXPECTED

  "Denys had been out of Africa for the whole of 1921, Tania for the whole of 1920. They were reunited at the end of the long rains, when fireflies came to the highland woods and skyscrapers of clouds topple through the blue."
  
  I wanted to like this novel very much but it never happened. I thought that I would have found deep and interesting characters, and get to really know the blue-eyed boy Denys Finch Hatton. It was repetitive and vague in many parts, but although it was not for me, others may like it. I was not impressed.
  Reviewed by Heather Marshall Negahdar (SUGAR-CANE 05/08/08)