America from the Air: An Aviator's Story (American Land Classics)
A joyous, wonderful book. Beginning with his own visceral passion for flying, Wolfgang Langewiesche leads the lay reader effortlessly into the arcane world of the pilot—first as he learns to fly, then as he learns to look. The writing is unobtrusively elegant, and the book is a page-turner of the first order. Langewiesche looks at flying in all sorts of ways: as a skill, painfully to be learned on the antique crates of the post-Wright Brothers years, as an art to be mastered, as an experience in psychology and emotion—and as a new way of looking at the earth.(Peirce Lewis, Emeritus Professor of Geography, The Pennsylvania State University)Here Wolfgang Langeweische, master of aviation writing, reminds us of flying's wonders: learning, seeing, feeling and the joys that are still there, despite today's complications. A book for all pilots to read.(Bob Buck, author ofWeather FlyingandNorth Star Over My Shoulder)The heart of the work is in Langewiesche's sensitive, descriptive prose, which will keep readers—both veterans and newcomers—entranced(Sport Aviation)[Langewiesche] introduced Americans to their own environment as seen from the air, combining his love for the coasts, farms, and plains of his adopted country with his love for flying slightly over them.(Reference and Research Book News)