In Full Flight: Story of Africa and Atonement

The remarkable story of one woman’s search for a new life in Africa in the wake of World War II–a life that sparked a heroic career but also hid a secret past.

Dr. Anne Spoerry treated hundreds of thousands of people across rural Kenya over the span of fifty years. A member of the renowned Flying Doctors Service, the French-born Spoerry learned how to fly a plane at the age of forty-five and earned herself the cherished nickname Mama Daktari – Mother Doctor –from the people of Kenya. Yet few knew what drove her from post World War II Europe to Africa. Now, in the first comprehensive account of her life, Dr. Spoerry’s revered selflessness gives way to a past marked by rebellion, submission, and personal decisions that earned her another nickname–this one sinister–working as a doctor in a Nazi concentration camp. In Full Flight explores the question of whether it is possible to rewrite one’s troubled past by doing good in the present. Informed by Spoerry’s own journals, a trove of previously untapped files, and numerous interviews with those who knew her in Europe or Africa, John Heminway takes readers on an extraordinary journey across a haunting African landscape and into a dramatic life punctuated by both courage and weakness and driven by a powerful need to atone.