Flight of Passage: A Memoir

by Rinker Buck

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781401305772
Publisher:	Hachette Books
Publication date:	03/05/2013
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	258
Sales rank:	433,567
File size:	3 MB
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Rinker Buck began his career as a reporter for the Berkshire Eagle in western Massachusetts. He then worked for New York, Life, and Adweek magazines, and his articles and columns have appeared in numerous national magazines and newspapers. Flight of Passage is his first book. He and his wife, Amelia de Neergaard, live with their two daughters in Cornwall, Connecticut.

Editorial Reviews

"It was the best summer of our lives and there would never be another one like it," Buck recalls in this gripping adventure story from June 1966. That was when, at age 15, he and his 17-year-old brother, Kern, flew from New Jersey to California and back in a Piper Cub that they had painstakingly restored, becoming the youngest aviators to fly coast to coast. Freelance writer Buck successfully combines details of this flight with a chronicle of the family interaction that inspired the trip. The eldest sons of magazine publisher Tom Buck, father of 11 children and a barnstorming pilot whose flying days ended when he lost a leg in a 1946 plane accident, Rink and Kern were raised to fly. This coming-of-age memoir, replete with colorful anecdotes about open-cockpit planes and their pilots, is a pleasure to read. Photos. BOMC, QPB and Reader's Digest Condensed Books selections; audio rights to BDD Audio. (June)

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

In 1966, the 15-year-old author and his 17-year-old brother flew across the United States in a Piper Cub. This book recalls their adventure, from conceiving the idea, persuading their father to allow it, preparing the airplane, and taking the trip itself. As a memoir, it is enlivened by adult reflection on youthful feelings and thoughts. Buck is a skilled writer who, even at that age, was familiar with the classics of aviation literature by Saint-Exupry and Ernest Gann. His description of crossing the Rockies at Guadalupe Pass in Texas echoes the best scenes of Saint-Ex's short stories and Gann's novels. But Buck has fashioned a rite of passage, involving the important presence of the boys' father, Tom Buck, an old barnstorming pilot who, although a successful magazine editor, never forgot his glory days. Buck sensitively describes the father-sons and brother-brother relationships through the filter of intense and confused emotions of a teenager. Highly recommended for all collections. [Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 2/15/97; BOMC selection.]Mary Ann Parker, California Dept. of Water Resources Law Lib., Sacramento

Library Journal

An old-fashioned air adventure in the tradition of Charles Lindbergh's celebrated autobiography, The Spirit of St. Louis.

Buck, who has written for New York magazine, among other publications, revisits the crowning moment of his youth, the newsworthy 1966 coast-to-coast trek undertaken with his older brother, Kernahan, in a reconditioned Piper Cub. Young Kern Buck, soon after getting his pilot's license at 17, cooked up the idea of flying all the way from New Jersey to California in the two-seat, hand-crank, tailwheel airplane, which the brothers would purchase for $300 and meticulously restore over a long winter. Rinker's presence would be required as copilot and navigator in the radioless Cub. After settling on a southern route through Texas by way of Arkansas, the brothers steered "stack to stack" through the steel smog along the river mills at Pittsburgh, with overnights in Indiana, Arkansas, and Texas, reporters picking them up for interviews along the way. The memorable pass through the Rockies, near El Paso, where the pilots battled oxygen starvation as they approached the Guadalupe Pass, is the dramatic centerpiece of the book. From the distance of early middle age—he is now near the age of his father at time of the flight—the author filters his impressive tale through a prism of sympathy for the passionate, damaged man who taught his sons to fly and whose own barnstorming yarns inspired their unusual feat. Says the author, who like his brother sought a way to make a place for himself beyond the shadow of Buck Sr., "The simple audacity of our trip, our complete naiveté and nonchalance, astounds me still."

This enchanting story of youthful accomplishment, which includes masterly insider descriptions of flight, should reach a broad audience.

Kirkus Reviews