Customer Reviews

Sky High: Stories of Survival from Air to Space

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A worthy successor to "Wild Blue", which is still one of the series' very best volumes in my opinion. Sky High is 300 pages, 12 nonfiction tales and a selection from H.G. Wells' First Men in the Moon. I'd have preferred another true story, but that's me. There are two WWI flying tales, and a pair of WWII stories, one very good. Rounding out the military aviation is a complete article about several days spent on a modern aircraft carrier - strong stuff. Yeager tells of breaking the sound barrier (Wolfe's version was excerpted in "Wild Blue"); in Sky High the excerpt from Wolfe's 'The Right Stuff' is about John Glenn orbiting the earth, and it's terrific. Gene Cernan describes the tensions of walking in space and an excerpt from Chaikin's 'A Man on the Moon' details the horrifying Apollo fire that killed astronauts Grissom, White and Chaffee. Personally I think these 'space stories' are the three best in the book. Rounding it all out - an interesting full piece on crop dusting, a tribute to an Alaskan Bush pilot and a not-so interesting story about a nature writer who survives a plane crash (my least favorite, luckily at the end where it doesn't interupt the flow of adrenaline.) Three of the 13 selections are complete, the rest are excerpted. This volume lives up to the 'adrenaline' rush the cover promises and if you like it, don't forget to check out "Wild Blue".