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 wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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