I've read it more than once. It's a great book. I'm a fan of Hemingway the character more than Hemingway the writer.
Hemingway spends a considerable amount of the book interjecting two of his favorite themes - competition and jealously. His competition with "Karl" (who was his Key West buddy Charles Thompson) I'm sure was real. His dressing down for his petty jealously by Phillip Percival was equally as real.
All this really does give the reader a sense of what it would have been like to go on safari with EH. You would have lectures on novelists, drinks in the evening, you would have been subjected to Eh's competitiveness, which would have been on everything from the quality of trophies, to backgammon to flirting with the girls on the ship cruising to and from NY. That was Hemingway. Charles Thompson was exposed to Hemingway's fits of moodiness when his trophies weren't the tops in camp, and I'm sure that soured more than a couple of evenings around the fire.
I wish Hemingway spent more time talking about Percival, considered the "dean" of the East African PH's, as well as more time telling the reader which part of Tanzania (Tanganyika in those days) he was in. I wish he had written it as Hemingway the newspaperman rather than Hemingway the novelist, but I still love the book, but...
Is it heresy to say that I enjoyed Ruark more?
