A noble, thrillingly realized combat aviation memoir from one of America’s finest.
A seasoned airman shares his legacy as a Navy fighter pilot.
Pedersen, a distinguished military veteran known as the “Godfather of Topgun,” is credited with establishing the Navy Fighter Weapons School. His memoir, a collection of captivating, action-packed anecdotes and pivotal events in his naval career, moves briskly through time spent with committed men dedicated to their “monastic calling.” The author enlisted in 1956, and he covers his early years before moving into tales of Vietnam. As mounting losses and ineffective artillery, tactics, and leadership weakened America’s defensive strategies in the 1960s, Pedersen recalls craving a fresh master plan to even the odds. Recognizing Pedersen’s excellence in aerial gunnery and overall flight and defensive precision, the Navy selected him, then stationed at Miramar, California (“Fightertown USA”), to head up an air combat graduate school featuring eight other passionate and talented officers known as the “Original Bros.” In describing the founding days of Topgun, the author details his selection of veteran pilots and a procedural curriculum to utilize the new MiG fighter jets. He also highlights the toll their call of duty took on marriages and families; regrets aside, “for us, flying always came first.” Throughout the book, Pedersen ably conveys the immense camaraderie among the courageous brotherhood of American fighter pilots and conjures the excitement of daring aerial combat and weaponry maneuvers. He proudly notes that, at its 50th anniversary, the Topgun course remains the standard of excellence for providing air combat and weapons systems training. With the hot-seat velocity and cockpit realism of a military combat thriller, the author delivers exacting details and emotional acuity. Now 83, he admits to still experiencing the same visceral rush when seeing fighter aircraft zooming overhead as he did when he was a wartime naval aviator: “I can’t fly anymore,” he writes, “but my heart is still up there.” Pedersen also includes a helpful glossary of terms and acronyms.
A noble, thrillingly realized combat aviation memoir from one of America’s finest.Pub Date: March 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-316-41626-9
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Hachette
Review Posted Online: Jan. 5, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2019
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.
Rootin’-tootin’ history of the dry-gulchers, horn-swogglers, and outright killers who populated the Wild West’s wildest city in the late 19th century.
The stories of Wyatt Earp and company, the shootout at the O.K. Corral, and Geronimo and the Apache Wars are all well known. Clavin, who has written books on Dodge City and Wild Bill Hickok, delivers a solid narrative that usefully links significant events—making allies of white enemies, for instance, in facing down the Apache threat, rustling from Mexico, and other ethnically charged circumstances. The author is a touch revisionist, in the modern fashion, in noting that the Earps and Clantons weren’t as bloodthirsty as popular culture has made them out to be. For example, Wyatt and Bat Masterson “took the ‘peace’ in peace officer literally and knew that the way to tame the notorious town was not to outkill the bad guys but to intimidate them, sometimes with the help of a gun barrel to the skull.” Indeed, while some of the Clantons and some of the Earps died violently, most—Wyatt, Bat, Doc Holliday—died of cancer and other ailments, if only a few of old age. Clavin complicates the story by reminding readers that the Earps weren’t really the law in Tombstone and sometimes fell on the other side of the line and that the ordinary citizens of Tombstone and other famed Western venues valued order and peace and weren’t particularly keen on gunfighters and their mischief. Still, updating the old notion that the Earp myth is the American Iliad, the author is at his best when he delineates those fraught spasms of violence. “It is never a good sign for law-abiding citizens,” he writes at one high point, “to see Johnny Ringo rush into town, both him and his horse all in a lather.” Indeed not, even if Ringo wound up killing himself and law-abiding Tombstone faded into obscurity when the silver played out.
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-21458-4
Page Count: 400
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2020
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
bookshelf
