It’s hard to imagine a more comprehensive look at the Red Knight program—and at aerobatics in general.
An exhaustive history of the Red Knight solo air show.
The titular aerobatics demonstration program began in 1958, the result of a propitious combination of historical variables. Just after World War II, the Royal Canadian Air Force was eager to show off its jet fighters and display its combat readiness to Canadian citizens and the world at large. Two significant anniversaries were fast approaching, furnishing the program with celebratory reasons to showcase its skills: the 50th anniversary of the first time that a Canadian flew a powered aircraft (1909) and the 35th anniversary of the RCAF itself (1924). Debut author Corrigan devoted a quarter-century to researching and writing this history, which charts with painstaking meticulousness the full 12 years of the program’s operation. The jet that it used was the Canadair T-33A, which was eventually painted with Day-Glo red paint to increase its visibility and help avoid collisions, which led a photographer to give it the moniker “Red Knight.” The show became increasingly popular; tens of thousands of spectators could attend a single demonstration, and it expanded to include additional planes and a tour of the United States. Although largely billed as entertainment, the low-altitude precision flying was extremely dangerous as well as physically grueling for the men in the cockpits—on three occasions, pilots died. Lt. Brian Alston was the last, and his accident in 1969 was the principal reason that the show was finally retired. Despite its brevity, this is a mesmerizingly detailed history—a fact that’s impressive and exasperating at the same time. Corrigan buries the reader under minutiae, which sometimes makes the book as a whole seem more like an encyclopedic reference work than a remembrance to be consumed all at once. However, his diligence will reward the truly interested reader, and his diagrams and illustrations are helpful, descriptive tools. Also, the author ably highlights the extraordinary physical demands that the flight missions made on the pilots; the centrifugal force of some of the more daring maneuvers was punishing, indeed.
It’s hard to imagine a more comprehensive look at the Red Knight program—and at aerobatics in general.Pub Date: Oct. 4, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-5255-1536-1
Page Count: 386
Publisher: FriesenPress
Review Posted Online: Nov. 30, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.
Coelho is a Brazilian writer with four books to his credit. Following Diary of a Magus (1992—not reviewed) came this book, published in Brazil in 1988: it's an interdenominational, transcendental, inspirational fable—in other words, a bag of wind.
The story is about a youth empowered to follow his dream. Santiago is an Andalusian shepherd boy who learns through a dream of a treasure in the Egyptian pyramids. An old man, the king of Salem, the first of various spiritual guides, tells the boy that he has discovered his destiny: "to realize one's destiny is a person's only real obligation." So Santiago sells his sheep, sails to Tangier, is tricked out of his money, regains it through hard work, crosses the desert with a caravan, stops at an oasis long enough to fall in love, escapes from warring tribesmen by performing a miracle, reaches the pyramids, and eventually gets both the gold and the girl. Along the way he meets an Englishman who describes the Soul of the World; the desert woman Fatima, who teaches him the Language of the World; and an alchemist who says, "Listen to your heart" A message clings like ivy to every encounter; everyone, but everyone, has to put in their two cents' worth, from the crystal merchant to the camel driver ("concentrate always on the present, you'll be a happy man"). The absence of characterization and overall blandness suggest authorship by a committee of self-improvement pundits—a far cry from Saint- Exupery's The Little Prince: that flagship of the genre was a genuine charmer because it clearly derived from a quirky, individual sensibility.
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.Pub Date: July 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-06-250217-4
Page Count: 192
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1993
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
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