From Publishers Weekly
A splendid thing in a small package is this flying book compiled from several earlier works of fiction (including the great novel of Korean War aviation,
The Hunters) and memoir, and from Salter's journals. Salter graduated from West Point in 1945 and went straight into the Army Air Force, later the U.S. Air Force. His training was not always smooth—he once lost his way over Pennsylvania and crashed into a house in Massachusetts. But he survived to qualify in fighters and to fly a tour of duty (100 missions) in Korea in F-86s, shooting down one MiG. After the war Salter flew fighters in Europe before resigning from the air force to embark upon a distinguished literary career. The text has excerpts from
The Hunters; another novel about the European years,
Cassada; his previous memoir
Burning the Days; and an unpublished diary from the Korean tour. Although it's sometimes difficult to tell whose voice one is hearing, all the voices have a superb command of the English language and vividly depict the sensations and human interactions involved in flying.
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--This text refers to the
Hardcover
edition.
Award-winning novelist Salter is a West Point graduate and was a pilot in the Korean War. The missions he flew over Korea form not only the basis of his fiction but also the foundation on which he built much of the rest of his life. This book, concerned with his flying years, draws from a journal he kept at the time, from the novels
The Hunters (1956) and
cassada (2000), and from his memoir
Burning the Days (1997). The journal sections, in particular, amount to a jump back to a time and place largely forgotten except by those who were there; the whole book is valuable for that alone, though those interested in the genesis of Salter's writing will highly appreciate it. Above all, the book collocates some of the finest aviation writing of the twentieth century, otherwise hard to find, if not altogether out of print. Let us hope this book will inspire the reprinting of some of those from which it extracts.
Frieda MurrayCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
--This text refers to the
Hardcover
edition.
