David Blatner

This book DOES have A Lot about the holidays, but now I’ll always remember that Purim is the Esther story and that Jewish children celebrate it every year in delightful little masque parties, you know.

I mean, the first time I wrote this review…. I don’t know. I wrote a lot about anti-Semitism, and I guess, I don’t know. I mean, you could say a lot about anti-Semitism, not least among us Christians, even today, liberal and conservative: different guises and disguises, different ways of passing the buck and playing denialism, you know. It’s a lot. But then also, Jews are not just the gas chamber victim people. I mean, Holocaust Remembrance Day is a real thing, and it should be a real thing, but it’s not like…. Like in “Labyrinth of Lies”, where the guy is going around in a daze almost and he says, “We Germans should wear black forever.” That’s not what Judaism is, obviously. Jews are not just there to collect or be receptacles for my goyish guilt, even if it takes some regard for Jews to truly realize this honestly. I guess sometimes we all just feel intense dysphoria around being part of some group or another that causes pain, you know. (But especially if it’s white Gentiles.)

That being said, I don’t know…. Like I said at first maybe I thought that the book had been bad too, since it was maybe a little bland and holiday-y; God I hate holidays—I don’t want to hear about there being others. But I guess holidays could be part of “making Jewish choices”, as another book has it, which could certainly matter for Jews, and it is part of one way to see the life-affirming aspects of Judaism, as being a particular way that particular people choose to live their lives, and not just seeing them as the Christmas crushers, the Israel lobby, the weird and irrelevant folk, the bad childhood memories, the guilt-inducers that Hitler crushed, or however people think about Jews when they have little engagement with the ideas of Judaism, or esteem for Jews.… (more)

Definitely an interesting book that is still more or less accurate and gives mostly correct information about what it's like to fly. I use all of these qualitative adjectives because the book was published 15 years ago, and since then we've had a huge recession and jet fuel price fluctuations that have created a lot of changes in the commercial aviation industry. We have fewer commercial airlines, no longer get served meals on airplanes, have to pay to check bags, and can't bring liquids in our carry-on items. (For the most part.) However, things such as jet safety, turbulence, and many other points addressed in this book have maintained relatively constant.

One thing I really didn't like about this book was the format. Be a coffee table book with cutesy quotes and informational columns, or be a chapter book about flying. This book tries to be both and sort of fails at both accounts. I found myself completely ignoring all of the cutesy quotes, and most of the pictures in this book are not captioned, which makes them almost useless. At times, the text is placed over images of airplanes that makes the text nearly unreadable.

Otherwise... I would give this book a solid "borrow from your library if you're interested in the nuts and bolts of flying on an airplane" recommendation. But I certainly wouldn't spend money on it.… (more)

Most of us have flown on a plane at sometime in our lives. As you sit in your seat cruising through the atmosphere high above the earth, have you wondered what keeps you up there? When you land have you wondered how the pilot knows what route to take to get to the terminal safely? What is turbulence and is it dangerous? How do jet engines work? How do the toilets work and can you be suck into it? Why is flying the safest way to travel? How are modern airplanes built?

These are just some of the questions that this book will answer plus many more. Plus it is fun to read in part because the author places factoids in boxes around the page some of which are quotes from history about man's ability to fly which now are funny.… (more)