Inside the Sky: A Meditation on Flight Review

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(More customer reviews)The author, a self-described "child of the sky," writer of two well-received travel books and correspondent to the Atlantic, here offers seven essays exploring and demonstrating the literal and metaphoric "view from above." The essays illustrate the importance of people as a part of geography, the necessity of intimacy and trust for accurate perception, and, more practically, the limits of man's efforts to control the weather, the sky, and, finally, himself. The book is at its best describing events such as the Valujet crash, or in dense journalistic passages on the relationship between the FAA and air traffic controllers, the Fujita scale, or chaos theory. His digressions remind one of John Mc Phee in their spare complexity. At its worst, the distant and sometimes jargon-filled prose only confuses or condescends to his landlocked readers. The reader does not come to know the author, it must be assumed, by his own design. The author seems to see himself as above--exotic, more honest, in sum, betterthan his non-flying readers, or many of his subjects (he is particularly patronizing to tourists). The flying novice would have an easier time reading through to the truly wonderful parts if the author were more accessible. Pilots and pilot wannabes will love the book, however, if flying is a way of thinking, as the author contends, it is not a way of thinking he has made particularly attractive.

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