Books with author S. G. Wheeler

Excerpt: ..."You're a brave, sweet girl," she said. "Now I think I'll rest again." Neither one mentioned the aerial duel they had witnessed as the special roared on to the pace of its quickened motors. Jane prepared breakfast and while her passenger sipped the hot chocolate, the stewardess went up to the pilots' cockpit. "Some dog fight," said Charlie Fischer. "Those army boys showed up just in time." 129 "I suppose I should say it was terrible," said Jane, "but knowing what those bandits would have done to my passenger, I feel they got just what was coming to them." "They had time to repent all of their sins on the way down," admitted Charlie. "Say, we're skipping Des Moines. Got plenty of fuel to take us to Iowa City." When they landed in the eastern Iowa city, another message from New York reassured Mrs. Van Verity Vanness and she read most of the way into Chicago. When they rolled up to the ramp of the Chicago field, Jane suggested that her passenger step out and walk a bit. "You'll feel much better," she assured her. Mrs. Van Verity Vanness agreed and Jane assisted her out of the plane. Reporters were clamoring at the gate, but a cordon of police kept them from the field. Charlie Fischer grinned as he went by. "I'm going over and be a hero," he chuckled, nodding toward the cameramen and reporters, who were hungry for the story of the escape from the bandits. The short, stocky figure of Hubert Speidel, 130 personnel director of Federated Airways, emerged from the crowd and came toward them. He beckoned to Jane and she left her passenger for a moment. "Everything all right?" asked the personnel chief anxiously. "She seems to be enjoying the trip now," replied Jane, "but she wants a stewardess to continue with her." Just then Mrs. Van Verity Vanness took matters into...

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.