A Gift of Wings

by Richard Bach

Other authorsK. O. Eckland (Illustrator)

1981

Status

Available

Genres

Biography & Memoir

Biography

Collection

Standard Shelves

Publication

Bantam Doubleday Dell (1981), 299 pages

Description

Self-Improvement. Transportation. Nonfiction. HTML:From the bestselling author of Jonathan Livingston Seagull, comes an inspiring collection of short stories of being a pilot. With perfect insight, Richard Bach captures the true esssence of flying and the magic of being in the air. Philosophical and adventurous, each story will grab you and make you want to soar. Once again Richard Bach has written a masterpiece to help you touch that part of your home that is the sky. A gift for pilots, aviation afficionados, and anyone that loves to fly, this book captures the magic of life in all its limitless horizons.

User reviews

LibraryThing member gibbon

When I knew him, Harvey Jaggs was a milk roundsman; but on the wall of his modest house was a photograph of him as a young man in the stiff buttoned jacket of the Royal Flying Corps. He wan't a talkative man, and I recall only two things he told me about flying. One was the curious way in which

rotary engined planes proceeded across the airfield. In a rotary engine the crankshaft is bolted to the plane and the cylinders rotate around it with the airscrew fixed to them. Because of difficulties with carburation and ignition they effectively had only two speeds, "Stop" and "Go", so they bounded across the field in a series of giant leaps, the pilots cutting the engine at a nicely judged time before they reached flying speed. In the other, he said "Until you have sat at three thousand feet with nothing between you and the ground but a bit of plywood, you don't know what terror is." The military men who ran the RFC had denied their pilots parachutes, having decided that if they had them they might abandon their planes when in a tight spot . As a consequence they ran out of pilots before they ran out of planes. Those who survived were lucky - and few.

Richard Bach's short stories and the other pieces in this collection written between 1959 and 1971 are about airmen and their feelings for flying and their planes. As he himself says when wriiing about other flying books "The way to know any writer ... is to read what he writes. Only in print is he most clear, most true, most honest ... it is in his writing that we find the real man." In this book we find the real Richard Bach. I have given it four stars, not for the quality of the writing which is variable, but for the quality of the feeling.

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LibraryThing member Black_samvara

Shot through with a profound love of flying.

LibraryThing member SteveRoss

Is there anyone who can read this and not feel like they're in the cold and dark with him? I love this book and have read it so many times that I lost count.

LibraryThing member Writermala

My first thought as I started reading this book was that it was not as inspirational as "Jonathan Livingston Seagull" or "Illusions;" but as I read along I changed my mind. The author is very perceptive and he shares his views through his flight experiences for example when he warns us that

whatever we pray for we get. He himself finds out that the perspective he has found in flight means something more than all the miles he's gone.One of the more interesting essays in the book is where he compares "aviation 'and "flying."The most important lesson learned from this book though was that everything we need to know, is already within us, waiting till we call it.

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