Flight of Passage - Hardcover

Buck, Rinker

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0670856770 ISBN 13: 9780670856770

Publisher: Hyperion, 1997

Synopsis

In 1966 Kern and Rinker Buck, aged 17 and 15, bought a delapidated piper cub plane for $300, restored it over the winter in their barn and then spent the summer flying across America. They were the youngest aviators on record ever to fly an aeroplane coast to coast. In part, this is the compelling story of that flight, with writing about aeroplanes, pilots and about being in the air. The Buck brothers were retracing the mythical route west taken by their father, Tom Buck, who in 1932 during the Depression barnstormed around the country as a young pilot himself until financial ruin and a terrible air crash in 1945, in which he lost his leg and another man was killed, changed him utterly. The boy's flight was to fulfil their father's dream and yet, as they move across the country, so they become liberated from this dominating man and also explore their own relationship. This is a book about family, about ties, about masculinity and independence, but Rinker Buck is writing it as much as anything for his own daughters to take them inside a world which was, at the time, exclusively male.

About this title

Review

Writer Rinker Buck looks back more than 30 years to a summer when he and his brother, at ages 15 and 17 respectively, became the youngest duo to fly across America, from New Jersey to California. Having grown up in an aviation family, the two boys bought an old Piper Cub, restored it themselves, and set out on the grand journey. Buck is a great storyteller, and once you get airborne with the boys you find yourself absorbed in a story of adventure and family drama. And Flight of Passage is also an affecting look back to the summer of 1966, when the times seemed much less cynical and adventures much more enjoyable.

From the Inside Flap

Every writer keeps a secret, an episode from their past, hidden inside until maturity and their advancing powers conspire to bring it out; and that is certainly what happened with journalist Rinker Buck's Flight of Passage. Part adventure tale, part literary memoir, Flight of Passage is the
story of how two brothers resolved their differences and proved themselves to their father through a mythical odyssey across America.

In 1966, Rinker and Kernahan Buck, 15 and 17, bought a dilapidated Piper Cub for $300, rebuilt it in their barn, and then took off for California, making
headlines across the country as "the youngest aviators ever to fly America coast-to-coast." Buck movingly recreates the pre-Vietnam America of cheap strip motels and dusty landing strips, the perilous crossing of the Rockies and the Arizona deserts in a fragile plane without a radio, narrating a classic tale of the Sixties. But Flight of Passage is also a timeless ode to fathers and sons, evoking the rites of coming of age in a family driven both by demons and big dreams. This BDD Audiobook is read by the author--a man whom critics are already calling "a virtuoso storyteller in a very American vein."

Edition details

• Publisher: Hyperion
• Publication date: 1997
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0670856770
• ISBN 13: 9780670856770
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 352