In Full Flight: A Story of Africa and Atonement

Filmmaker Heminway (African Journeys) focuses his sixth book on the impressive career and mysterious past of Anne Spoerry (1918–1999), a French-born doctor who spent the last five decades of her life in rural Kenya, where she nearly eradicated small pox and polio and single-handedly treated over a million patients. Heminway draws on journals and extensive interviews with those who knew Spoerry in Africa and Europe. In his vivid, often riveting work, Heminway reveals Spoerry’s little-known collaboration with the Nazis during her internment in the Ravensbrück concentration camp, where, she later confessed, she administered fatal doses of medication to other inmates while working as a doctor. Sent to Ravensbrück because of her work in the French Resistance, Spoerry was put under the tutelage of Carmen Mory, “the Black Angel,” who Heminway views as a driving force in Spoerry’s decision to kill patients. Barred from practicing medicine in France and Switzerland, Spoerry found work on a ship headed to Africa in 1948, where she eventually settled and was able to conceal and atone for her past. Heminway captures his subject’s staggeringly complex past as well as the vitality of the continent that became her home in this unflinching and evocative work. (Feb.)