Takeoff-a ton of inert matter transformed by the pilot into a thing of spirit and beauty. Takeoff-lifting one's shadow off the earth, entering a new element where movement is the very condition fro existence, for, as the author observes, "in life, to choose the wrong wife or the wrong lift is conventionally viewed as being matters of varying gravity, but in piloting an aircraft an act of petty oversight, because of the obvious but decisive fact that in flight there can be no stopping, can be fail." Interweaving observation and dream, Takeoff is a meditation on flying. It carries the reader up to the clouds, into a world governed by different laws, where as we look through the cockpit window-and into our own souls-we see painful new clarity. Whether he is reliving his first solo flight or recounting the mysterious disappearance of an airliner, del Giudice focuses on the edge of experience where a person learns to take nothing for granted.
Book Description
Editorial Reviews
From Library Journal
Italian novelist del Giudice (Lines of Light, LJ 5/15/88) brings his experience as an aviator to bear in this accessible and variegated memoir. His small book reads like a novel composed of short stories, each chapter complete in itself while adding to the sum of feeling and empathy del Guidice is able to evoke in the reader. His style explicitly borrows from famed author-aviator Antoine de Saint-Exupery: understated, carefully paced, and remarkably clarifying to the earthbound in its presentation of the world of the lone pilot when preparing for takeoff, aloft, and upon descending again to terra firma. As such, this text will have wide appeal to readers of all situations in life, from the adolescent would-be adventurer through the armchair traveler and the seasoned pilot.?Francisca Goldsmith, Berkeley P.L., Cal.
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Booklist
These elegant ruminations about flying range from the dreamy to the concrete, from wartime to peacetime. Each of the eight self-contained stories looks insightfully at the delicacies of flying, an unnatural act that severely punishes any mistake, or recalls a past episode in aviation. In the historic incidents (though emphatically not written to be history), del Guidice eerily adopts the pilots' perspectives: talking with an Italian veteran, who reminisces about his torpedo bombing missions in the war, del Guidice induces reflections on the terrors of air battles; conjuring the pathos of an unsolved Italian airliner crash in 1980, del Guidice re-creates cockpit^-traffic control conversations, something the reader can understand thanks to a preceding chapter in which del Guidice explains the jargon of the air, as applied to his own embarrassment at getting lost in a cloud. With del Guidice at the controls, his taciturn instructor Bruno to the side, readers fly eventually with none other than Antoine de Saint-Exupery on that author's last flight over the Mediterranean. A classy, artistic number. Gilbert Taylor
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Magic takes wing,
By
This review is from: Takeoff: The Pilot's Lore (Hardcover)
If you like Richard Bach and Antoine de Saint Exupéry, you will likely love this little book. Masterful meditations on flight. A book for pilots and lovers of flying, about looking out the window, and into the soul. Very well received, but somehow overlooked by many pilots.
0 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
for flying lovers,
By Mitch (bigfish_mickyt@yahoo.com) (Milano,Italy) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Takeoff: The Pilot's Lore (Hardcover)
Just one-minute review: if you love to fly read it because it explains,for me, many and many years of thoughts about my grandpa' WWII ,that flew whit the sm79 descripted in "Pauci sed semper immites". You would capture the best individual italian style.
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