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
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
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
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