Warm, funny, with a touch of suspense, this adventure will delight anyone who’s sought an illusive prize.
An aviation enthusiast travels to Russia in search of World War II fighter planes and discovers, not unsurprisingly, that nothing in Russia comes easy.
Intrigued by German aircraft since childhood, the author dreams of acquiring a rare WWII German fighter plane. Twenty-one years later, he receives a call about some warbirds in a far corner of Siberia. He goes to work immediately wrangling business partners and investors for what will undoubtedly be an expensive trip. His boss/friend becomes his partner, and the two begin the difficult task of planning the excursion. They field strange and frustrating requests from middlemen, including a gentleman called the Admiral who expects $10,000 to guarantee their safety in an area he purports to control. As they come to learn, greasing palms is the only way to get things done in Russia. So begins Page’s treacherous and often hysterical journey, where everything, including information on where to get a cup of coffee, costs. The pilots who fly them are sometimes drunk, van drivers and their owners request extra payments mid-ride, extortionists hound them on the street–everyone wants something from the Americanskis, as they are haplessly shuttled from one aircraft graveyard to another, where planes beyond repair are offered at extraordinary prices. They even acquire a KGB tail. It’s not until a second trip, this time to St. Petersburg, that the men find a decent treasure, a Messerschmitt Bf109 German fighter. Requests for cash continue to pour in, and Page risks dipping into his own pockets to get the plane to his Denver warehouse. While the story doesn’t paint a pretty picture of Russia and its citizens, the author’s recollections are jaunty, and his eye for humor and the absurd keep the toilsome story upbeat. Historians, aircraft enthusiasts and adventurers will appreciate this impassioned hunt for his beloved craft.
Warm, funny, with a touch of suspense, this adventure will delight anyone who’s sought an illusive prize.Pub Date: April 18, 2007
ISBN: 978-1-58348-487-6
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 23, 2010
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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