Green Hills of Africa: The Hemingway Library Edition Paperback – July 19, 2016

I read this before going to Tanzania and loved it. After seeing the Serengiti and the area near where Hemingway was on safari (shooting all those animals!!), I appreciated his descriptions all the more. He takes you with him as he tramples through the brush with his guides and his guns, his booze, and his wife.

Not the best Hemingway story but the book is excellent for a library collection.

With books like The Sun Also Rises and A Farewell to Arms, I think it's hard for even Hemingway to compete with Hemingway. That being said, Green Hills was a fantastic read; it's a vivid portrait of an Africa long-since vanished and a very charming story. You really get a sense of Hemingway, the man, rather than just the storyteller. He's quick tempered and a little rough around the edges. All in all, great read.

Hemingway's memoir of a two month trip in Africa is filled with literary allusions about the plight of the writer dealing with himself and his demons, both personal and creative. It needs to be read with a guide for full appreciation. I am still not sure what a "Hippo" represents, but it might be his early novels. "Lions" could be short stories. "The Old Man in the Sea" is likely the "kudu" he sought.His writing is all pyschological landscape throughout the extended metaphor down to the "odors" to make you more aware. There are no pretty mountains painted with a romantic brush. "Green hills" might be piles of money he sought to maintain his austere lifestyle and heavy drinking habit. He is conscious of his "Soul" and cannot ignore it until he blacks out. The "salt lick" could be the local bar that sustained his feeling of comfort, at home with a few conscious notions. His conscience beckons and bedevils him and reminds him of a Higher Power he chooses to out drink. Women are on a pedestal and often with good aim making pleasant company. His alter ego stands as the person he strives to be, modest, friendly, charming, sociable and talented. His boastfulness and outspokeness are troublesome to the real him.He is also observant of the toll the imperialists have taken on Africa during their periodic marudings, especially the British. He is not kind to the Americans either, but sees virtue in hunting as an expression of man's unique place on Earth and of his free will. Man is man; God is God; we live most naturally in conflict even in the Garden of Eden (Africa).The trip to the "plateau" is an important journey for Hemingway and anyone seeking to understand the duality of the human mind. I don't know that young readers will understand his experience, but he was only 35 when he wrote "Green Hills.." and was already aware of an inner struggle between his conscious and subconscious mind. It may have been the theme of most of his writing, which he may have resolved at the end. We pray that is so.

I wanted to like Green Hills of Africa by Ernest Hemingway but I found it more boring than exciting. I have read Death in the Afternoon by him and it was a brilliant book in the whole sense of the word. This one lacks the entertainment value I was hoping to find reading about safari life in Africa. Surely has its moments but mostly they are all sitting by the fireside and long blocks of dialogue with Papa?, back and forth, forth and back, and less and less describing the wild life of the immense region that is Africa. I do not contest the fact that Hemingway has been in more exotic places than most of us can ever hope to be, for he strikes me as even royalty in some cases the way he thinks and acts. I am glad I bought this book used together with another book on the subject of safaris. The other one was heads and tails so much full of life and situations compared to this one. I guess he earned a living even while on vacation and documenting his itineraries was profitable enough. When he was on Africa he wrote of the place, when in Spain he wrote some masterpieces about that place as well. He gets started with dialogue that seem to me self aggrandizing, too full of himself and that is when is time to tune in to animal planet. Average reading for an obviously talented writer, a powerhouse of world wide recognition. I thought this book was going to be quite a book but I found myself skipping more and more pages. Don't have time to admire the name of a famous writer if the the story does not merit it. 3 Stars.

Appear to be great, but I have not had time to read at this point, service shipping the books was great.

It’s in like new condition

I love Hemmingway. However, this book was written for hunters. It's about travelling around Africa and yes,shooting big game, mostly that they just stumbled onto. They spend three-fourths of the book trying tofind Kudus and finally get two big Kudu trophies. They also end up with a Rino, a great male Lion and a couple ofother trophies. It's also about stumbling around in the intense heat and lots of dust with guides and bearers during the mostly dry season in Africa...and also African forests and a few villages they chance upon.If you're not a hunter it's a tedious book. I loved the rest of Hemmingway's books. His Biography is also a great read!

Me regalaron la versión en castellano hace muy pocos días y quise tenerla en kindle y en inglés lo antes posible.

Je ne savais pas quîl sagissait d'un produit Audio alors que je le voulais en Livre en Anglais, tant pis pour moi....

I read this book in an attempt to understand the motivations of the safari hunters of the 20th century. After travellling through Kenya and being overwhelmed by the beauty and drama of the safari animals, I wanted to know more about why so many Western men were seduced by the idea of killing them. Unfortunately Hemingway in this book doesn't provide many answers apart from a predictable desire for an image of tough masculinity. While it contains some great lyrical descriptions, the book quickly becomes simply a list of his 'triumphs'/killings and his petty competitiveness with other males in the pursuit of trophies. It does not compare with other Hemingway texts but is still worth the read.

Questionable literary value. After reading Green Hills of Africa, I question Hemingway's literary reputation: I really don't think its as good as decades of scholars have claimed it to be (at least based on this one story). Sure, he weaves a tale as if he were speaking to you around the fireside, so it is easy to understand. But superior prose? Don't buy it.As for the content of this book, the question kept arising: how much slaughter and killing of beautiful, innocent animals does one man need to engage in, and how many readers want to be told about it, over and over and over.Even accounting for the era (c. 1930s), the rampant killing of animals (at times wounding them to hunt down as they suffer) is egregious.Finally, the validity of some of the stories embedded in Green Hills become questionable when Hemingway write - at the very end - when he states "at Haifa, were sitting in the sun against a stone wall by the Sea of Galilee". What claptrap: the Sea of Galilee is 60km inland Israel, while Haifa is on the Mediterranean coast, so there is no way they were enjoying the sun in both those locations at same time!!!

Maybe it is a testament to his writing that a book about the incomprehensible subject of big game hunting, with a cast of unpleasant characters who possess few redeeming features was actually quite a good read.I like the way he writes dialogue, however, not being well versed in Hemingway’s books I can’t say if this is one of his better works – although I have a feeling it is probably not.An interesting read, but with far less description of the landscape, countryside and local people than I expected.