Green Hills of Africa

By: Ernest Hemingway

Narrated by: Josh Lucas

Length: 5 hrs and 58 mins

Publisher's summary

His second major venture into nonfiction (after Death in the Afternoon, 1932), Green Hills of Africa is Ernest Hemingway's lyrical journal of a month on safari in the great game country of East Africa, where he and his wife, Pauline, journeyed in December of 1933. Hemingway's well-known interest in - and fascination with - big-game hunting is magnificently captured in this evocative account of his trip.

In examining the poetic grace of the chase, and the ferocity of the kill, Hemingway also looks inward, seeking to explain the lure of the hunt and the primal undercurrent that comes alive on the plains of Africa. Yet Green Hills of Africa is also an impassioned portrait of the glory of the African landscape, and of the beauty of a wilderness that was, even then, being threatened by the incursions of man.

Who's your papa? Listen to more from Ernest Hemingway.

©1935, 1963 Charles Scribner's Sons and Mary Hemingway. All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form (P)2006 Simon and Schuster Inc. All rights reserved.

Outstanding! Josh Lucas IS Hemingway!

Wish Josh Lucas would read more of Hemingway's non-fiction! He nails it! Listen again and again!

Outstanding all-around

I love this writing of Ernest Hemingway. It seems to me to be a very detailed story, intriguing and pleasure to listen to. Th

The narrator does a fantastic job the way he lays out the story I've listened to this at least three times and love the reading kudos to Lucas.

Very Ernest Hemingway

It’s a nice time piece. Prepare yourself for situations and expressions and language that you would be hard pressed to hear even in tv or movie. It is real and well told
The chapters are also filled with lots of hunting and killing of great animals.

loved it

narrator does an amazing job bringing this story to life. Great window into the past

A Classic!

Loved it. Hemingway nonfiction was enjoyable and easy. Some might find it disturbing, but I throughly enjoyed it.

Fight Club & Hemingway

Would you recommend this audiobook to a friend? If so, why?

I was very interested in the movie Fight Club and the theme the movie communicated. In one scene of the movie Brad Pitts character was asked who he would most like to fight dead or alive, he said Hemingway. This statement became a thread I followed, as the character/writer would not mention Hemingway randomly. Wanting to know why "Hemingway"?, I read this non-fiction classic. It not only opened my eyes to the inspiration behind Pitt's character's statement but re-introduced me to perhaps the greatest American Author - equal to Mark Twain in my mind.

Read this book before reading any other Hemingway Novel (as well as his wikipedia page) and you will better see the writer himself behind the artistic and intense stories he created. After listening to Green Hills of Africa - I had to listen to his other books (I listened to "For Whom the Bell Tolls" - now the best book I've ever read). In the end I was entertained, inspired by his artistry and learned something about myself I didn't know.

You should read it too.

Good Story

Would you recommend this book to a friend? Why or why not?

I would recommend this book as the story is very interesting.
Because of the style of the writing it is a little hard to follow at times. The author tends to wander off the track but it is worth staying with the story.

The Pleasures of Place, People, and Persuit

Where a man feels at home, outside of where he's born, is where he's meant to go."
- Ernest Hemingway

Once, when I was 11 or 12, I begged my father to take me Mule deer hunting in Utah. Growing up in the West, among a certain strata of boy, the October deer hunt was a sort of blood ritual. We would take off from school for a couple days, go into the mountains with our fathers, shoot at things, and come home.

At this time in my life, I had tremendous blood lust. I wanted to bring something down. To be at the top of the pyramid for a second. To conquer something. I wasn't at the stage where I could explore where these impulses came from. The desire to carry and shoot. The desire to kill and show off my trophy. It really was a deep thing. I think as a child, I can best explain it as some way of coming to grips with the discovery that you are no longer the center of the Universe. You have recently discovered you aren't a god. So, you act like a god. You seek to become Shiva the destroyer, the killer of groundhogs, of robins, the boy who pulls the stinger out of bees in the window.

Lucky for me, I discovered (much later in life) that my father, a veterinarian, used to steer me away from the deer. He was happy to hike, camp, and shoot with me. He understood better than I, the stage I was in. Perhaps, at 11 or 12, disappointment with not finding something to kill might serve me better than blood.

Even now as I've grown, as I read Hemingway's 'Green Hills of Africa' and I feel all of those early impulses again. After finishing this story, I did a Google search to see how much a Safari in South Africa and Zimbabwe costs now days. I know this is absurd. It is one of those things I mock and despise among the rich. Photos of the Trump boys displaying their trophies or the owner of Jimmy Johns standing under an Elephant he has recently killed makes me both angry and sad at the same time. But I STILL, emotionally, deep down find myself thinking about Hemingway and Roosevelt. Thinking about the big tests, the pursuit, the hunt, the blood. It sickens and attracts. It is visceral. I really think C. G. Poore captured it perfectly when he said this story was "about people in unacknowledged conflict and about the pleasures of travel and the pleasures of drinking and war and peace and writing."

Boring yet worthwhile

It's not a very exciting book, you don't get that need to listen more, it's memorable though, and works almost as a diary for Hemingway and thus interesting in it's own way.

great story

like a hemingway novel but more true to his beliefs and ideas. performance was good just have a hard time imagining the voice as hemingway’s.