A readable and comprehensive guide to flying high as an airline pilot.
Swindell, Witvliet, and Ross present a guide to working as a pilot in the airline industry.
In this illustrated manual, the authors (all airline pilots “from both military and civilian backgrounds…with extensive experience in airline recruiting, training and union representation”) provide an overview of every aspect of the industry for readers who are thinking about joining their profession. They describe the various commercial airlines, airline alliances, regional carriers, cargo carriers, and private services, and they break down all the components of those entities under the Federal Aviation Regulations. They discuss workplace realities such as seniority, stating simply that “everything in your airline career is a function of seniority” while warning that this status is strictly service-specific: Starting over in a new part of the industry wipes the slate clean. The authors share tips on aspects of the business such as the relationship between pilots and flight attendants (FAs): “Should [FAs] call up [the cabin] during the flight with an issue, actively listen and help them solve the problem,” they write. “FAs do not typically call the pilots lightly.” The authors cover every element of getting hired and advancing in a pilot’s career, from researching different airlines to crafting a resume and cover letter to navigating interviews, and they elaborate on personal aspects of the job, including methods for getting enough sleep or the various ways in which pilots can fly as passengers cheaply or for free. At every heading, the authors use a variety of visual aids—charts, graphs, insets, bullet points, and illustrations—very effectively to clarify the details of the world a would-be pilot might enter. Their tone throughout is brisk and accessible—the entire book feels like an extended version of the polite-but-professional flight briefing pilots give to their crews before every takeoff. Prospective pilots will find this detailed career advice from three seasoned pros invaluable.
A readable and comprehensive guide to flying high as an airline pilot.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2021
ISBN: 9798985684506
Page Count: 342
Publisher: VATH Publishing
Review Posted Online: March 1, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A clearly delineated guide to finally eradicate poverty in America.
A thoughtful program for eradicating poverty from the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Evicted.
“America’s poverty is not for lack of resources,” writes Desmond. “We lack something else.” That something else is compassion, in part, but it’s also the lack of a social system that insists that everyone pull their weight—and that includes the corporations and wealthy individuals who, the IRS estimates, get away without paying upward of $1 trillion per year. Desmond, who grew up in modest circumstances and suffered poverty in young adulthood, points to the deleterious effects of being poor—among countless others, the precarity of health care and housing (with no meaningful controls on rent), lack of transportation, the constant threat of losing one’s job due to illness, and the need to care for dependent children. It does not help, Desmond adds, that so few working people are represented by unions or that Black Americans, even those who have followed the “three rules” (graduate from high school, get a full-time job, wait until marriage to have children), are far likelier to be poor than their White compatriots. Furthermore, so many full-time jobs are being recast as contracted, fire-at-will gigs, “not a break from the norm as much as an extension of it, a continuation of corporations finding new ways to limit their obligations to workers.” By Desmond’s reckoning, besides amending these conditions, it would not take a miracle to eliminate poverty: about $177 billion, which would help end hunger and homelessness and “make immense headway in driving down the many agonizing correlates of poverty, like violence, sickness, and despair.” These are matters requiring systemic reform, which will in turn require Americans to elect officials who will enact that reform. And all of us, the author urges, must become “poverty abolitionists…refusing to live as unwitting enemies of the poor.” Fortune 500 CEOs won’t like Desmond’s message for rewriting the social contract—which is precisely the point.
A clearly delineated guide to finally eradicate poverty in America.Pub Date: March 21, 2023
ISBN: 9780593239919
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 30, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
Alternately admiring and critical, unvarnished, and a closely detailed account of a troubled innovator.
A warts-and-all portrait of the famed techno-entrepreneur—and the warts are nearly beyond counting.
To call Elon Musk (b. 1971) “mercurial” is to undervalue the term; to call him a genius is incorrect. Instead, Musk has a gift for leveraging the genius of others in order to make things work. When they don’t, writes eminent biographer Isaacson, it’s because the notoriously headstrong Musk is so sure of himself that he charges ahead against the advice of others: “He does not like to share power.” In this sharp-edged biography, the author likens Musk to an earlier biographical subject, Steve Jobs. Given Musk’s recent political turn, born of the me-first libertarianism of the very rich, however, Henry Ford also comes to mind. What emerges clearly is that Musk, who may or may not have Asperger’s syndrome (“Empathy did not come naturally”), has nurtured several obsessions for years, apart from a passion for the letter X as both a brand and personal name. He firmly believes that “all requirements should be treated as recommendations”; that it is his destiny to make humankind a multi-planetary civilization through innovations in space travel; that government is generally an impediment and that “the thought police are gaining power”; and that “a maniacal sense of urgency” should guide his businesses. That need for speed has led to undeniable successes in beating schedules and competitors, but it has also wrought disaster: One of the most telling anecdotes in the book concerns Musk’s “demon mode” order to relocate thousands of Twitter servers from Sacramento to Portland at breakneck speed, which trashed big parts of the system for months. To judge by Isaacson’s account, that may have been by design, for Musk’s idea of creative destruction seems to mean mostly chaos.
Alternately admiring and critical, unvarnished, and a closely detailed account of a troubled innovator.Pub Date: Sept. 12, 2023
ISBN: 9781982181284
Page Count: 688
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2023
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