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SOLO

Name: SOLO
Author: Clyde Edgerton
ISBN: 1-56512-426-X

MY ADVENTURES IN THE AIR

by Clyde Edgerton ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 9, 2005

Flying was Edgerton’s crazy love, and his story of the affair goes ineluctably from the smitten and folksy to the fraught....

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What started with Edgerton (Lunch at the Piccadilly, 2003, etc.) learning to fly airplanes comes full circle through war, then back home to a horizon full of doubts.

Edgerton’s mother was protective, but she also wanted her boy to be independent and worldly, so she agreed to let him fly, first in high school, then as a ROTC candidate in college. As Edgerton patiently explains the fundamentals of flying—from physics to check lists, instrumentation, lifting off, landing, recovering from stalls (Edgerton will make your hair bristle here)—he conveys the distinct personalities of aircraft and his own experiences with them: Cherokee 140, Laredo, T-41, T-37, T-38, F-4, and the OV-10 that he later flew on missions in Vietnam. Before then, though, each plane was a passage toward a destiny he couldn’t have imagined, each one a bit of training with fun and high jinks, mock dogfights, nights spent stealing the general’s car. Edgerton brings an energy and innocence to these proceedings, though they prepare neither him nor the reader for what was to come when he shipped to Japan. There was the real possibility of nuclear engagement with North Korea, but that fact slipped over his head. What couldn’t pass him by were bombing runs on the Ho Chi Minh Trail in Laos, or searching for downed pilots, many of them lost forever (though they maintained radio contact while on the ground for some time). Since then, Edgerton has done a lot of brooding about his war years, about how flying, once so bright and pure, became a vehicle for misgivings that collapsed into discomfort and dread, then regret. He even has a swansong later in life, but his nose gets dirtied and he’s ready to hang up the goggles.

Flying was Edgerton’s crazy love, and his story of the affair goes ineluctably from the smitten and folksy to the fraught. File under, “Icarus.”

Pub Date: Sept. 9, 2005

ISBN: 1-56512-426-X

Page Count: 296

Publisher: Algonquin

Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2005

Categories:

BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | HISTORICAL & MILITARY | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR

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PAPADADDY'S BOOK FOR NEW FATHERS
by Clyde Edgerton

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THE NIGHT TRAIN
by Clyde Edgerton

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THE BIBLE SALESMAN
by Clyde Edgerton

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THE PURSUIT OF HAPPYNESS

FROM MEAN STREETS TO WALL STREET

by Chris Gardner with Quincy Troupe ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 2006

Well-told and admonitory.

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Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.

Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.

Well-told and admonitory.

Pub Date: June 1, 2006

ISBN: 0-06-074486-3

Page Count: 320

Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006

Categories:

GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BUSINESS

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NIGHT

by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...

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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.

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the sphere of suffering shared, and in this case extended to the death march itself, there is no spiritual or emotional legacy here to offset any reader reluctance.