Martha Gellhorn is curiously dated and sentimental [in The Weather in Africa]. The three stories are set in Kenya before and just after Independence…. In all three stories, Africa changes the lives of people; but somehow, the resolutions are achieved in spite of the characters' interactions which remain on the most basic level, and in their recounting seem to me to retain the crudest of racial assumptions. Love scenes are either stilted, if between whites … or torrid, if between black and white … which is a cue for disaster). However, the heart is in the right place.
Mary Hope, "Books: 'The Weather in Africa'," in The Spectator (© 1978 by The Spectator; reprinted by permission of The Spectator), Vol. 241, No. 7828, July 15, 1978, p. 25.
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