An authentic voice helps this tale take off.
Knecht’s memoir takes readers up into the rarefied atmosphere of being an international flight attendant with iconic airline Pan American, with its special culture, exotic locales, and quirkiness.
Debut memoirist Knecht is a very engaging schmoozer. After becoming a Pan Am flight attendant just out of college, she planned to work there for a couple of years, then pursue other plans; instead, she remained with Pan Am until its demise in the early 1990s. She took to world travel like a Boeing to the jet stream. Readers also learn about her upbringing and ambitions. In those days, Pan Am ran a tight ship, and esprit de corps was high. There was, of course, some tomfoolery (Knecht is a member of the Five Mile High Club). On the somber side, the hijacking in the title refers to the 1986 hijacking of Pan Am 73 on the tarmac at the Karachi airport. Knecht wasn’t on the flight, but many friends were, including an Indian flight crew whom she had trained and befriended. Knecht tells the story well, capturing the anxiety and horror. After Pan Am, and on a very loose arrangement with its successor, Delta, she became a private flight attendant, serving on private or corporate jets, where she met many celebrities about whom she is now happy to dish. Speaking of dishes, her book also includes recipes for many items from the famous Pan Am menu. Knecht is a competent though not fully polished writer given to clichés. Anecdotes, the life of her memoir, are alternately amusing and somewhat forced, or the reality struggles to survive the telling. Always hovering behind the narrative like a ghost is the downfall of Pan Am—a bittersweet backdrop for such an alluring profession.
An authentic voice helps this tale take off.Pub Date: Nov. 26, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-5025-2349-5
Page Count: 208
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: July 23, 2015
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 horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
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