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In Full Flight

Alfred A. Knopf, February 13, 2018

A woman’s quest for a new life in Africa in the wake of World War II — and a heroic career that hid a secret past.

Over the span of fifty years, Dr. Anne Spoerry, French by birth, treated hundreds of thousands of individuals across rural Kenya. A member of the renowned Flying Doctors Service, Spoerry earned 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 story of her life, her revered selflessness gives way to a past marked by rebellion and submission, during which she earned another nickname–this one sinister working as a “doctor” in a Nazi concentration camp.