Cultured Travel Guide Books - Solo: My Adventures in the Air (Shannon Ravenel Books) |
 |
List Price: $12.95
Our Price: $0.49
Your Save: $ 12.46 ( 96% )
Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours
|
|
Binding: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 920
EAN: 9781565125469
ISBN: 1565125460
Label: A Shannon Ravenel Book
Manufacturer: A Shannon Ravenel Book
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 288
Publication Date: 2006-11-10
Publisher: A Shannon Ravenel Book
Studio: A Shannon Ravenel Book |
| Spotlight Customer Reviews: |
Customer Rating:  
Summary: Not well written or particularly interesting.
Comment: I suppose if you are a pilot, hearing Edgerton re-tell his own experiences learning to fly would be pretty interesting. If you're just interested in planes, the book is just OK. If you're looking for a good story you'll be deeply disappointed.
About 1/3 of the book is learning to fly one plane after another. About 1/3 is an attempt to make sense out of his service in Vietnam. The remaining 1/3 is filler with an occasional anecdote, sometimes interesting.
What is so surprising is how clumsily the text is written and how little he has to say. I think maybe he wrote this book too long after the fact. The Vietnam war was a long time ago, and his memories have faded.
Customer Rating:
Summary: A healthy dose of military aviation insights.
Comment: You may recognize Clyde Edgerton's name: he's written eight previous novels but here provides a compelling saga in SOLO: MY ADVENTURES IN THE AIR, a biographical memoir which provides the true account of his flying experience, from Air Force training and combat missions in Vietnam to his own personal plane. The joy Edgerton holds for planes and flying shines from every chapter: any with an affection for planes will love this celebration of flight, which holds a healthy dose of military aviation insights.
Diane C. Donovan
California Bookwatch
Customer Rating:
Summary: It should have been great.
Comment: Solo, by Clyde Edgerton, could have been a great book about flying. Edgerton's experience in aviation along with his obvious life long passion for flight, combined with his post-flying resume entry of Professor of Writing and the University of North Carolina (Wilmington) should have been the recipe for the best book of flying since Rinker Buck's Flight of Passage. Unfortunately, it is not. That stated, this is a good book that aviation enthusiasts will likely forgive Prof. Edgerton's flaws and enjoy its quickly passing pages.
Solo begins slowly with a rather poor explanation of flight and flight controls for the non-pilot reader. It reads as some dated and poorly written instruction manual. Edgerton should have just stuck with his suggested reading mentioned in the Author's Note of Wolfgang Languisher's timeless "Stick and Rudder". My sense in that most who will want to read this book either know about the basics of flying or don't care and just want him to get to his jet training and his rediscovery of the joy of flying general aviation "taildraggers" later in his life. A good one third to one half of this book reads more like a diary then a work of a military pilot, trained also as a writer. Ah, but the second half . . .
Solo literally soars in the second half, dealing with the writers training in military fighter aircraft in the Vietnam Era and of his experiences in that environment. Edgerton also nails the rediscovery of flight later in life in small and slow general aviation aircraft. He writes clearly and beautifully on what all of us in the aviation community know about flying - it almost doesn't matter what you fly, as long as you fly. Here is a fighter pilot accustomed to F-4 Fantom jets, the premier fighter of its day, falling in love with a Piper 2 seater with an engine half the size of most of today's cars. Unfortunately for all readers, just when building to this crescendo and dénouement he falls back to listing seemingly nonsensical and peripheral logbook entries and spoils the end.
As a pilot and flight instructor, my predisposition was to enjoy this book and, by and large, I did. But that was only because my blinders allowed me to get past his very obvious poor and disjointed writings. As with too many books a couple of more critical edits could have made this a must read. I would say it is a fun, quick read but only for those who have a real passion for flight.
Customer Rating:
Summary: How low can you go? Solo
Comment: My father and I have the same last name, we are both pilots and we have both read SOLO by Clyde Edgerton. That's were we parted company. My dad liked it. I did not.
Imagine the movie AMERICAN GRAFFITI after you cut out hotrods, drive-ins, and cute girls and replaced them with characters rehashing their collective driver's training experiences. Then you would have SOLO: MY ADVENTURES ON THE GROUND.
SOLO is a dull book so stuffed with filler that it could have been sold as a pillow. It contains pages of walking around a plane and explaining every part; pages of flying a plane and explaining every control; pages of the author's old letters home; pages of transcribed audiotapes; pages of anecdotes that never quite become interesting, pages of dialog that convey little meaning.
Only two stories were memorable:
The first story struck me because it typifies the style of book and underlines its major fault: only cookie-cutter characters populate Edgerton's universe. Readers are first introduced to fellow fighter pilot Rob on page 150 only because Edgerton needs to tell of his death on page 151. Worse, Edgerton tells the story as a laundry list of facts without apparent emotion or empathy. The sum total of Edgerton breaking the news to Rob's fiancé on page 152 is, "I sent a telegram to Lynda and then wrote her a letter."
The second story suprised me because it demonstrated that Edgerton can tell a story well when he wants to. Taking nine pages instead of his usual nine sentences, Edgerton does a great job of conveying the tale of two downed pilots he helped search for while on duty in Vietnam. Neither pilot was found. Much later in life, Edgerton discovered that one of the missing pilots had survived the war as P.O.W. while the second remains missing to this day.
Unfortunately, one interesting story does not make a book or justify its purchase. I gave 2 stars out of respect for Edgerton's service to his country and because I save 1-star reviews for the truly awful. If I were giving it a letter grade though, I would give it a D- because Mr. Edgerton earns his living as a professor of creative writing and should know better.
In short, a more accurate title would have been: SOLO: MY SINGLE INTERESTING ADVENTURE IN THE AIR.
Customer Rating:
Summary: An Insight into the Dream of Flight
Comment: This book is probably the best written book I have read this year. It is an example of a book written by someone who knows their subject matter well. Edgerton has a way of making you feel as though you are a fly on the wall of the cockpit.
He used this skill to guide us through his flying years, be it when he was watching planes at the local airport or when he was commanding pilot over the jungles of Vietnam.
I would recommend this book for anyone who has an interest in aviation or good writing. I particularily enjoyed this book because I have an interest inflight and it is always great to hear and read about someone who has done something with the dream.
This is one great book.
|
| More Reviews |
| Editorial Reviews: |
When Clyde Edgerton was four years old, his mother took him to the local airport to see the planes. For Edgerton, it was love at first sight. Eighteen years later, she would take him to the same airport to catch a flight to Texas for Air Force pilot training. In Solo, Edgerton tells the story of his lifelong love affair with flying, from his childlike wonder to his job as a fighter pilot flying reconnaissance over the Ho Chi Minh Trail. Now, nearly thirty-five years after the war in Vietnam, he looks back at his youthful passion for flying, at the joy he took in mastering it, at the exhilaration—and lingering anguish—of combat flying. It is a story told with empathy and humor—and with searing honesty that will resonate with every pilot who remembers the first takeoff, the first landing, the first solo. For the nonpilots who always choose the window seat, it’s a thrilling story to live vicariously.
|
|
|
|
|
