In 1937 the notion of a Danish woman who would serve as head of a vast African coffee plantation seemed only slightly less exotic than the notion of one who might spend her life in the Ngong hills of Kenya among the Kikuyu and Maasai. “Here at long last one was in a position not to give a damn for all conventions, here was a new kind of freedom,” wrote the divorced, fiercely independent Baroness Karen von Blixen-Finecke. Her memoir depicts the close relationships she fostered among the men who worked for her, giving African characters a complexity and dignity not found in other colonial texts. The occasional brutality and profound loss that characterize colonial life do not overshadow the serenity with which Blixen-Finecke writes, fostering wanderlust in anyone who reads her book.