A stimulating glimpse into the life and career of an Australian pilot.
In his memoir, Fenton tells of how, since the first time he saw an airplane fly over his remote island home in Australia, there was never any doubt what his life’s calling would be.
Fenton has put together a brief but comprehensive biography of his fascinating life since being born in 1941 on Lord Howe Island, about 400 miles northeast of Sydney, where he still lives. Depictions of his carefree childhood on the wild, beautiful island can be enthralling: surfing off white-sand beaches, gathering exotic foods from the island and the vast ocean surrounding it, the bliss-filled days of youth. With no telephone service, contact with Australia consisted of supply vessels and infrequent flights. Fenton’s father, who helped operate the island’s radio and Morse code station, taught his son the basics of the code, a skill that would come in handy later in his life. As a child, Fenton was mesmerized by the huge flying boats that brought tourists to the island. Early on, he decided that one way or another, airplanes and flying would be a major part of his life. At the age of 15, he was accepted into the Royal Australian Air Force Apprentice program; it wasn’t flight school, but he was on his way. The vivid portrayals of his military training are interspersed with in-depth commentaries on what he saw and experienced while there. Fenton began service as a teenage apprentice in 1957 and, after 29 years, ended as a wing commander in 1986. During that time, he learned to fly bombers and fighters, became a commissioned officer and fought in Vietnam. The author is adept at condensing considerable time spans into short, salient descriptions of events, providing a fast-moving, captivating narrative. In fact, some areas fly by a bit too quickly, leaving questions unanswered, though it won’t be a deal breaker for interested readers.
A stimulating glimpse into the life and career of an Australian pilot.Pub Date: March 27, 2013
ISBN: 978-1483607351
Page Count: 140
Publisher: Xlibris
Review Posted Online: Aug. 1, 2013
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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