3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Flight of Eagles Review , by Nick Gatz cass pd.4, November 1, 2001
This review is from: Flight of Eagles (Paperback)
I found the Flight of Eagles by Jack Higgins to be very interesting and intriguing. The book had a strong plot in which Higgins caught the reader's attention by pulling in historical figures with fictional ones leaving you with suspense and thoughts of always wanting to find out what happens next. The books main Characters Harry Kelso and Max Von Halder are described with such realistic traits, thoughts, and actions by Higgins you would believe that they were real fighter pilots. The characters are described with great detail but often it is hard to keep track of them all until the end when Higgins ties them all together. I found it very interesting as to how Higgins used the bear Tarquin as a symbol in the book to tell the story of two separated brothers brought together by war. The realistic details of war, the planes the brothers flew, and the whiskey they drank made it seem as though you could be sitting right there with them. The book is full of suspenseful action that leaves you with a feeling that you just can't stop reading because you are eager to find out what happens next. The books ending is surprising but well organized in bringing all the events to a whole.
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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A good World War II yarn about twin brother fighter pilots., June 5, 1998
By A Customer
Flight of Eagles, by Jack Higgins,1998, Putnam Pub, New York,Hardcover, 336 pp., $17.47 U.S. (from Amazon.com)
"In the early days of World War II, brothers Max and Harry Kelso--born in the U.S. shortly after the first world war to a German war nurse mother and an American fighter ace father--find themselves on opposite sides of the conflict. For it seems that forces much greater than they have set into motion an intrigue so devious, so filled with peril, that it will require that they question everything they know, all that they hold most dear. A new thriller by the author of The President's Daughter."
Jack Higgins, who also writes under his real name, Harry Patterson, is a real yarn spinner. Among others, he gave us the 1975 best seller, The Eagle Has Landed. He reminds me of another author whom I knew personally, named R. Wright "Bobby" Campbell, who wrote The Spy Who Sat and Waited.
Both men were high school dropouts, with interesting backgrounds. Higgins' background includes the military, circus roustabout, laborer, and truck driver before he went to college and became a teacher and author.
Bobby Campbell, who lived in Carmel, California when I knew him, would sit across a restaurant table from you and spin a story. He was a natural-born story-teller, and seemingly couldn't help himself.
Another fiction writer of the same ilk was the late Louis L'Amour. He also had a background as a roustabout, truck driver, merchant seaman, prize-fighter and other such jobs, which enabled him to know about life close up and personal.
After all, before you can write convincingly, you need some life experience, and the best of them seem to spend years participating in life before they begin to write about it. But I remember asking Bobby Campbell once how much time he had spent in the Orkneys (the islands North of Scotland) in order to write with such authority about the people and their customs, whom he described so well in The Spy Who Sat and Waited.! He laughed, and said he got everything he needed in the way of research from the encyclopedia.
That will only work, though, for someone who has lived a lot, and observed people closely in their griefs, sorrows, joys, loves and hates. Fiction is an art form, unlike report writing or editorial writing. Not everyone can do it, and of those who can, not all are equal. Jack Higgins is truly one of the master story-tellers.
His protagonists are convincingly drawn, and his plots seem believable even when they are far-fetched. In this one, the Nazis want to assassinate Eisenhower. In The Eagle Has Landed, it was Churchill they were after.
This is good fiction. He works in real people, like Bubi Hartmann, the top-scoring German fighter ace of World War II, and Adolph Galland, who was their highest scoring ace in the Battle of Britain, and who eventually became their chief of fighters. The last I heard, both were still alive.
Higgins weaves a good tale, and you should enjoy this one.
(...)
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