North Star over My Shoulder: A Flying Life [Paperback]

Bob Buck (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: December 21, 2004

Captain Robert N. Buck retired from TWA after having flown well over two thousand Atlantic crossings and thirty-seven years of service as chief pilot and director of thunderstorm research. During World War II he was engaged in weather research for the U.S. Air Corps, for which he was awarded, as a civilian, the Air Medal by President Harry Truman. More recently, Buck has worked with the International Civil Aviation Organization -- the UN's body for aviation -- to develop a new plan of world airspace.

In North Star over My Shoulder, Bob Buck tells of a life spent up and over the clouds, and of the wonderful places and marvelous people who have been a part of that life. He captures the feel, taste, and smell of flying's great early era -- how the people lived, what they did and felt, and what it was really like to be a part of the world as it grew smaller and smaller. A terrific storyteller and a fascinating man, Bob Buck has turned his well-lived life into a delightful memoir for anyone who remembers when there really was something special in the air.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Bob Buck may not be as famous as Charles Lindbergh, but he's well known among aviators for setting flight-distance records in the 1930s, flying a B-17 in the Second World War, and finally, becoming a commercial airline pilot who logged more than 2,000 trips across the Atlantic Ocean. North Star over My Shoulder is Buck's memoir of a life spent in the skies. He shares plenty of cockpit wisdom: "A copilot can make a trip or ruin it; get someone who talks too much, gripes about the company, tries to impress you, tells long and boring anecdotes, or is overly aggressive in suggesting ways to run the flight, and the taste is unpleasant." He also answers the question he says nonpilots are most likely to ask him: How do you overcome jet lag? "You don't," he says. Buck addresses offbeat subjects, too, such as what an airline pilot does when one of his first-class passengers is irate about the lack of caviar on a long trip. Readers fascinated by flight will enjoy this book, both for its historical perspective on advances in aviation ("a time no one will ever experience again") and the good advice that springs from almost every page ("sitting low tends to make you level off a little too high, while sitting up high tends to make you fly into the ground and not level off enough"). Pilots will appreciate this book, as will anybody who has ever wondered what it's like to fly a plane. --John Miller --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Publishers Weekly

What's not to love about flying? For all the numbing routine, constant danger and bad food, Buck can't find much to complain about. He's been flying since the 1920s and still today, at age 87, takes the occasional glider for a spin. His autobiography is a thumbnail history of the air transport industry, which he's been a part of practically since its inception. The book skips most of Buck's personal life and focuses on airplanes. Buck relates his wide-eyed first flying experience at 16 with an enthusiasm normally relegated to the pages of romance novels. He quickly became a copilot and eventually a pilot for nascent Missouri airline TWA. His descriptions of these early flights in bare-bones vehicles have a white-knuckle intensity, especially when the weather turns bad (one passage tells of the few options pilots had when dealing with ice forming on their windshields: opening a small window at 10,000 feet and scraping it off with a putty knife was one of them). During WWII, Buck flew a special weather-research B-17 around the world and after the war became one of the airline's most senior pilots. In the course of his life, he flies over most of the known world and meets fellow air aficionados Tyrone Power and Howard Hughes. Buck writes in an appealing, no-nonsense manner that only occasionally becomes labored the literary equivalent of one too many friendly punches in the shoulder but this is an exciting memoir from an endearingly obsessed man who has been just about everywhere and can't wait to tell how he got there, and in what kind of plane and at what altitude. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 448 pages
• Publisher: Simon & Schuster (December 21, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0743262301
• ISBN-13: 978-0743262309
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.3 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (31 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #152,070 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

27 of 27 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Flying life, April 17, 2002

By 

Dave English (Arizona, USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: North Star over My Shoulder: A Flying Life (Hardcover)

A wonderfully written book of an amazing life. From DC-2 to 747, it was a career spaning the greatest changes in civil aviation. A story that is now told by someone who was active in advancing the skill of airline flying and can make it very readable. The airline pilot autobiography is not a new idea - there have been some good ones and boat-loads of just OK ones - but this is the best I've read.

A pilot's pilot (Captain Buck flew the line, did research and wrote some best-selling classic pilot education books) who can make the flight through the decades come alive. Imagine sitting down with an old man at a small airport who still pilots gliders and he turns out to be a storyteller of great wit and charm, a man who still remembers when crossing the Atlantic was a battle, who was there when airline flying advanced from shaky pistons to huge jets. Who would not want to relax in the sun, watch the airplanes, and listen to the wonders of TWA unfold. In the tradition of St. Exupery, Ernest Gann and Len Morgan. And yes, I liked it.

20 of 20 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Pilot's Bible for Survival, December 30, 2002

By A Customer

This review is from: North Star over My Shoulder: A Flying Life (Hardcover)

Bob Buck is now a Legend in the flying field. His own books have seen to that, but this doesn't detract from the fact that he should be legendary. But there is something about legendary flyers that is often missed. Those of us who were around them didn't know they were legends, and neither did they.

In my own flying career which started after Buck's but paralleled his last quarter of a century, the critical period he himself identifies as the high water mark of flight development, I was aware of only one true legend: Lindbergh. Buck has a high opinion of him from a couple of meetings with him, and forgets or forgives his leather-headed period during his America First days before WWII when anyone with an iota of sense knew that America would have to get into the fight against the dictators and their bloody regimes. Lindbergh didn't think so. That position lined him up with those we damned and hated around our supper table in the late 1930's, the Isolationists who kept us out of the War until it was almost too little too late. Thus, the one time I met Lindbergh, I thought, "No doubt you're a great aviator, but you're actually a jerk about some things." So much for legends.

It appears to me that reviewers overlook something in this book that is actually its main theme. The fact that you can't get out and walk when flying comes after you with the idea of killing you dead as a door nail. Thus, always in the back of the mind of all good pilots is the need to plan every move, to try to anticipate every eventuality and decide what to do in advance. This is to say that the fear of death is always in the back of a good pilot's mind and should be to assure planning; leaving nothing to chance that can be prepared for.

Thus, what it boils down to is that Buck in one scene after another, without doing it literally, is repeating that old truism: "There are old pilots, and there are bold pilots, but there are no old, bold pilots." To which I add, "If there are they were [darn] lucky!"

I loved flying, but I always knew it might come and get me. So I learned and you will find that Buck did in spades, that a couple of the surest ways to avoid catastrophe in flying are: [1] to recognize the proposed flight that shouldn't leave the ground in the first place after everything that should be is evaluated, and [2] to turn around when headed into the trouble you are mortally certain can involve dangers you are not reasonably sure you can handle. (Such as finding you can't fly with no fuel by trying to make it too far.)

Naturally I loved this book, recognized the right of the writer to say every word he wrote, disagree with almost nothing he says, or did (except failure to fire a hostess who was an obvious damn fool, as well as insubordinate) and think his prose ranks with the best.

If you never read another book on flying, this one would give you a taste for the whole thing.

27 of 29 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Life story of a great aviator, March 30, 2002

By 

Marty Sacks (Baltimore, MD USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: North Star over My Shoulder: A Flying Life (Hardcover)

Buck's latest book shifts gears away from his classic style of teaching pilots to fly better. This book is autobiography at its best. The reader travels with the author as he learns to fly open cockpit biplanes and then sets aviation records as a teenager. We then join him in the DC-2/DC-3 days as a new copilot for TWA. The upgrade to Captain, flying a B-17 doing research, numerous ocean crossings in all kinds of weather and then the transition to flying jet airliners - it's all here.

Along the way I was introduced to Tyrone Power and Howard Hughes. Fascinating stuff.

I enjoyed this book for its many stories but most of all for the tremendous amount of history about the golden age of aviation that Captain Buck passes along to us.

This book is a treasure.