Henry Kisor didn’t realize what he was getting himself into when a friend invited him aboard his small plane one afternoon, but as the engine revved and the craft took flight, he found himself exhilarated as never before. Fifty-three years old, Kisor had looked into a mirror and saw staring back ”a man who was short, fat, bald, bespectacled, and deaf.” He needed to reclaim his zest for life, and he found the answer in learning how to fly.Kisor’s dream begins to take shape when he learns that radio communications are not required in most of America’s airspace, and that ”visual flight rules” are the same for hearing and deaf pilots alike. With the eagerness of newfound youth, he throws himself into his lessons and plans a suitable maiden voyage: a reenactment of Cal Rodgers’s 1911 journey from New York to Los Angeles, the first coast-to-coast flight. Along the way, Kisor learns that Rodgers himself suffered from severe hearing loss, which adds an unexpected personal connection to the enterprise.Soon after getting his license, Kisor falls in love with a thirty-six-year-old beauty: a classic Cessna two-seater that he buys and renames Ginn Fizz, in honor of Rodgers’s Vin Fiz (which was itself named after a popular soft drink of the day). He then plans out his trip and invites the reader into the cockpit as he takes to the air, dodging storms and greasing landings on a journey across America that recalls the derring-do of the early days of aviation. Landing sixty-five times along a route that takes him from New York to Chicago to Texas to California, Kisor introduces us to the men and women who make up the ”brotherhood of aviation”—those who staff the airports, repair the planes, teach student pilots, ferry skydivers (and sometimes jump themselves), and perform aerobatic stunts —and who open a window onto a rich and charming side of American life and lore, but Flight of the Gin Fizz is an internal journey, too, as Kisor slowly shakes off the midlife blues that had led him to the Cessna’s left seat in the first place. As he proceeds west toward his goal, Kisor learns how to push the envelope of his own capacities, reaching new levels of proficiency and self-reliance, and stretching the limits of his familiar landbound life. For pilots, passengers, and armchair travelers of all stripes, Kisor offers an unforgettable voyage of self discovery and high adventure—and a new appreciation of life’s possibilities.
Henry Kisor is the retired book editor of the Chicago Sun-Times as well as the author of three nonfiction books and three mystery novels. He is also the co-author of one children's book.
He is the author of a series of mystery novels set in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, Season's Revenge (2003), A Venture into Murder (2005) and Cache of Corpses (2007). A fourth novel, Hang Fire, is forthcoming.
His nonfiction works are What's That Pig Outdoors?: A Memoir of Deafness (1990 and 2010), Zephyr: Tracking a Dream Across America (1994) and Flight of the Gin Fizz: Midlife at 4,500 Feet (1997).
His books have been published abroad in German, Dutch and United Kingdom editions.
He writes two blogs, The Reluctant Blogger and The Whodunit Photographer.
He was the book editor of the Chicago Sun-Times from 1978 to his retirement in 2006, after five years in the same position with the old Chicago Daily News.
His reviews and articles have appeared in the New York Times Book Review, the Los Angeles Times, the Washington Post and on MSNBC.com. Between 1977 and 1982 he was an adjunct instructor at Northwestern University's Medill School of Journalism. From 1983 to 1986 he wrote a weekly syndicated column on personal computers that appeared in the Chicago Sun-Times, Los Angeles Herald-Examiner, Orlando Sentinel, Seattle Times and other newspapers.
He was named a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism in 1981. The Friends of Literature awarded him the first James Friend Memorial Critic Award in 1988 and the Chicago Foundation for Literature Award for Nonfiction in 1991 for What's That Pig Outdoors? In 1991 Trinity College awarded him a honorary Doctor of Letters degree. In 2001 he was inducted into the Chicago Journalism Hall of Fame.
Educated at Trinity College (B.A., 1962) in Hartford, Conn., and at Northwestern University (M.S.J., 1964) in Evanston, Ill., Kisor began his newspaper career in 1964 with the Evening Journal in Wilmington, Del.
He winters in Evanston, Illinois, and summers in Ontonagon, Michigan, with his wife, Deborah Abbott. They have two grown sons, Colin, an attorney with the U.S. Department of Justice (m. Melody Pershyn), and Conan, a corporate communications editor and writer for the Boeing Company (m. Annie Tully). They also have two grandsons, William Henry Kisor and Conan Emmet Kisor; two granddaughters, Elizabeth Maria Kisor and Alice Flynn Kisor.
