A Gift of Wings

there was a good bit that i liked in this little book, which was kind of a relief after how much i disliked the last one of his that i read (the bridge across forever). i thought that most of this was decently written and much of what he had to say i was more than willing to listen to. it's a book of short essays (some of them only a couple of pages) and there were a few that seemed repetitive or not on par with the rest; i think it would be an improved book if it was a little shorter. but overall it was alright. and i ended with a feeling of - well, i've never been remotely interested in flying, but maybe i should try it somehow. so he certainly managed to impart his love. (of planes and flying, that is; he's still pretty much a show more jackass to women - or the only woman he mentioned in one of the essays.) show less

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.

A Gift of Wings is a collection of essays and short stories centering around the author's experience with and love of flying airplanes. The subjects range from his time in the military to barnstorming across the Midwest and from flying antique biplanes to new planes. Most of the book is very philosophical in nature, and it is sometimes hard to tell where the author crosses the line from nonfiction into fiction.

I really waffled about whether to give this 3 or 4 stars. Some of the stories were really great, some were hard to get through, and some were just average. While the star rankings of all the stories probably averages to 3 stars, in the end I decided to bump it up to 4 stars because the author really made me want to be able to fly show more an airplane and experience the world the way he experienced it. I wish I could fly across the country in an antique, open cockpit biplane, land in any rural field I happened to be passing, spend the night camping under the wing of the plane, and take off again the next morning to see the whole country from above. I do wish, however, that there had been less technical aviation jargon in the book. Not a bad read, but it's probably best to take the stories in small doses to avoid getting burnt out from the parts that are not that great. show less

This book is a compilation of articles Richard Bach wrote from the late 50s through the early 70s about his love of flying. Even though I'm not a fan of flying, I enjoyed his articles because each was different. Some spoke about the feeling of freedom, some relayed the joy of talking to other pilots about their experiences, some talked of the fun of cross-country flying, one was about the frustrations of not doing very well in a soaring competition, one about the JFK airport, and on and on they went. Each unique, each interesting.

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, show more 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. show less

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.

Shot through with a profound love of flying.