A delightful, informative homage to a life of flight.
A pilot’s debut memoir highlights the joys and risks of flying.
There’s been no scarcity of movies and books valorizing the miracle of aviation, but few have effectively captured the personal perspectives of the pilots themselves. Here, McDonald describes, through anecdotal reflection, his life as a helicopter pilot and artfully reveals the perils unique not only to aviation, but to his particular vehicle. He discusses his start in naval aviation school, where he initially trained to become a jet pilot. His struggles with motion sickness were so severe that he changed course and learned how to fly a helicopter—a less glamorous option but one with plenty of its own dangers. Eventually, he became a pilot in the Texas Shock Trauma Air Rescue program, which provided him with a diverse array of challenges that ranged from the routine (transporting medical personnel) to the extraordinary (undertaking rescue missions in extreme weather). In one of the book’s highlights, the author gives a play-by-play depiction of a harrowing rescue in torrential rain that caused severe flooding. Although the prose is consistently lighthearted and even humorous, it also seriously chronicles the palpable sense of risk in McDonald’s profession: “Aviation, in general, is inherently unforgiving,” he writes. “The list of competent, well-respected aviators who have died while plying their trade is sobering to contemplate.” In fact, his career was eventually brought to an end by injuries that inflicted permanent neurological damage. He astutely portrays the psyche of the pilot, a fascinating brew of perpetual preparedness and type A bravado. He also leavens his depictions of crisis and insecurity with breezy storytelling, as when he tells a genuinely funny story about how a conversation with Lee Harvey Oswald’s daughter partially inspired his career as a STAR pilot. At times, readers may be overwhelmed by the minutiae of administrative details, but they’ll likely welcome the author’s lengthy presentations of the technical aspects of flying. This is a memoir, first and foremost, but McDonald’s devotion to capturing the character of flight promises broader appeal.
A delightful, informative homage to a life of flight.Pub Date: Jan. 11, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-4575-4494-1
Page Count: 380
Publisher: Dog Ear
Review Posted Online: March 2, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
From the national correspondent for PBS's MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour: a moving memoir of her youth in the Deep South and her role in desegregating the Univ. of Georgia. The eldest daughter of an army chaplain, Hunter-Gault was born in what she calls the ``first of many places that I would call `my place' ''—the small village of Due West, tucked away in a remote little corner of South Carolina. While her father served in Korea, Hunter-Gault and her mother moved first to Covington, Georgia, and then to Atlanta. In ``L.A.'' (lovely Atlanta), surrounded by her loving family and a close-knit black community, the author enjoyed a happy childhood participating in activities at church and at school, where her intellectual and leadership abilities soon were noticed by both faculty and peers. In high school, Hunter-Gault found herself studying the ``comic-strip character Brenda Starr as I might have studied a journalism textbook, had there been one.'' Determined to be a journalist, she applied to several colleges—all outside of Georgia, for ``to discourage the possibility that a black student would even think of applying to one of those white schools, the state provided money for black students'' to study out of state. Accepted at Michigan's Wayne State, the author was encouraged by local civil-rights leaders to apply, along with another classmate, to the Univ. of Georgia as well. Her application became a test of changing racial attitudes, as well as of the growing strength of the civil-rights movement in the South, and Gault became a national figure as she braved an onslaught of hostilities and harassment to become the first black woman to attend the university. A remarkably generous, fair-minded account of overcoming some of the biggest, and most intractable, obstacles ever deployed by southern racists. (Photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-374-17563-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1992
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.
A light-speed tour of (mostly) Western poetry, from the 4,000-year-old Gilgamesh to the work of Australian poet Les Murray, who died in 2019.
In the latest entry in the publisher’s Little Histories series, Carey, an emeritus professor at Oxford whose books include What Good Are the Arts? and The Unexpected Professor: An Oxford Life in Books, offers a quick definition of poetry—“relates to language as music relates to noise. It is language made special”—before diving in to poetry’s vast history. In most chapters, the author deals with only a few writers, but as the narrative progresses, he finds himself forced to deal with far more than a handful. In his chapter on 20th-century political poets, for example, he talks about 14 writers in seven pages. Carey displays a determination to inform us about who the best poets were—and what their best poems were. The word “greatest” appears continually; Chaucer was “the greatest medieval English poet,” and Langston Hughes was “the greatest male poet” of the Harlem Renaissance. For readers who need a refresher—or suggestions for the nightstand—Carey provides the best-known names and the most celebrated poems, including Paradise Lost (about which the author has written extensively), “Kubla Khan,” “Ozymandias,” “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads, which “changed the course of English poetry.” Carey explains some poetic technique (Hopkins’ “sprung rhythm”) and pauses occasionally to provide autobiographical tidbits—e.g., John Masefield, who wrote the famous “Sea Fever,” “hated the sea.” We learn, as well, about the sexuality of some poets (Auden was bisexual), and, especially later on, Carey discusses the demons that drove some of them, Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath among them. Refreshingly, he includes many women in the volume—all the way back to Sappho—and has especially kind words for Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop, who share a chapter.
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-300-23222-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Feb. 8, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
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