MARK VANHOENACKER is a pilot and writer. A regular contributor to The New York Times and a columnist for Slate, he has also written for Wired, the Financial Times, the Los Angeles Times, and The Independent. Born in Massachusetts, he trained as a historian and worked as a management consultant before starting his flight training in Britain in 2001. His airline career began in 2003. He now flies the Boeing 747 from London to major cities around the world.
**A New York Times Notable Book of 2015**
**An Economist Bestseller and Best Book of 2015**
**A Wall Street Journal Best Book of 2015**
**The Sunday Times (UK) Book of the Week**
**BBC Radio Book of the Week**
**A Guardian Favorite Book of the Year**
**A GQ Best Book of 2015**
**A Bloomberg Best Book of 2015**
**A San Francisco Chronicle Recommended Book**
Dwight Garner, The New York Times
“Vanhoenacker…can put one in the mind of Henry James….His is a
big-hearted book….Vanhoenacker is a talented writer, and we greet
him at the start of what I hope is a career of writing about life
in the heavens….marvelously literate…If his book had been around in
the mid-80s, I suspect I wouldn’t have been afraid to fly in the
first place.”
Tom Zoellner, The New York Times Book Review
“Superb….Vanhoenacker writes in a richly ethereal style, with the
confidence of a professional who knows his subject well…it’s an
elegant, nonlinear reflection on how flying on a commercial
airliner—even while painfully folded into a seat in coach—can lift
the soul and inspire an awareness of the wonderfully improbable, of
the state of ‘in-betweenness’ in which air travelers routinely
hover.”
Rinker Buck, The Wall Street Journal
“[Vanhoenacker is] an exceptionally lucid and philosophically
minded writer. He has spent the past several years taking notes
about his life in the air and meditating on both the ethereal
beauties and contradictions of flight…He reminds me of a brainy
college physics major who actually wants to be a poet.”
The Economist
"Mr Vanhoenacker, fortunately for his readers, has lost none of his
sense of wonder at the miracle of flight itself...a beautifully
observed collection of details, scenes, emotions and facts from the
world above the world."
Emily St. John Mandel, The Millions
“Skyfaring is a love letter to flight, to a profession, and
reading it was a balm. Vanhoenacker slips easily between poetic
meditation into the nature of travel and technical explanations of
the mechanisms of the 747, and I found all of it fascinating....The
book’s meditative pacing isn’t dissimilar to the rhythms of
flight itself, to the way landscapes gradually unspool far below.
There’s tremendous pleasure in coming across the explanations
for aspects of flight I’d never quite understood....It was easier,
after reading it, to forget my exhaustion and the small annoyances
of the world and lose myself again in the beauty of the
flight.”
Geoff Dyer, The Guardian
"There is always something uplifting about people in love with
their work, and on becoming an airline pilot Vanhoenacker (now a
senior first officer with British Airways) seems to have attained a
state of enviable grace....Beautifully, because simply, put.
As the principles of aerodynamics act 'as a kind of
natural sculptor' to create the elegance of aircraft design,
so Vanhoenacker’s prose has a functional eloquence that
carries the reader along for the ride."
The Times Literary Supplement
"A Senior First Officer flying 747s for British Airways, he
explains that many pilots regard aeroplanes as 'the first thing
they loved about the world'. His abiding attachment is likely to
make this masterly, beautifully written book one of aviation’s
classic texts – Saint-Éxupéry seventy years on, and with more to
say."
Sarah Larson, The New Yorker, "What We're Reading This
Summer"
"[Vanhoenacker] seems to have the mind of a scientist and the
heart of a poet."
John Wilwol, San Francisco Chronicle
“Skyfaring artfully demystifies the fascinating technical
aspects of commercial flight while delivering poetic insights
straight from the cockpit.”
Bill Prince, GQ
“Both a manual for infrequent flyers (wherein the physics and
metaphysics of time and space are for once essayed in a perfectly
straightforward manner) and a skilful meditation on the glories of
traversing the earth at the helm of mankind's greatest
technological achievement that - yes - flies from the page.”
Pico Iyer, author of The Man Within My Head
“Poets are pilots of a kind, teaching us to navigate the world
anew; Mark Vanhoenacker is a pilot with the spirit, the wide-open
eyes, the rare feel for beauty and discovery of an accomplished
poet. Imagine Henry David Thoreau reflecting on the wonders of the
lights of Oman as seen from the cockpit of a 747, and you begin to
have something of the fresh magic of this exceptional debut. This
is a work for anyone who longs to learn how to see again, and to
live.”
Alain de Botton, author of How Proust Can Change Your Life
“One of the most constantly fascinating, but consistently
under-appreciated aspects of modern life is the business of flying.
Mark Vanhoenacker has written the ideal book on the subject: a
description of what it’s like to fly by a commercial pilot who is
also a master prose stylist and a deeply sensitive human being,
familiar with great art and literature and always willing to tease
out the psychologically resonant implications of his job. This is a
man who is at once a technical expert (he flies 747s and Airbuses
across continents) and a poet of the skies. This couldn’t be more
highly recommended.”
James Fallows, author of China Airborne
“Skyfaring is a beautiful, revelatory work of observation,
thought, and expression. The experience of traveling through the
air, which would have seemed miraculous in any previous moment of
human existence, has been drained of its wonder through the drear
of the modern airline experience. From his seat in the front of the
airplane, Mark Vanhoenacker captures and conveys the magic of
seeing the world from above.”
Patrick Smith, author of Cockpit Confidential
"Mark Vanhoenacker is the thinking man's pilot, and his is a rare
and refreshing perspective in an age when commercial flying is
taken almost entirely for granted. Through prose as passionate and
erudite as it is informative, he describes not merely the
mechanical workings of flight, but will rekindle, in those who care
to listen, a lost appreciation for the marvel of global air
travel."
The Times (London)
“A 330-page ode to the wonder of flight in the tradition of the
great pioneer pilot-author Antoine de Saint Exupéry and Charles
Lindbergh....Like the best pilot writers, Vanhoenacker paints
humanity seen from the aviator’s perch, woven together with a
fascinating layman’s account of the mechanics of flight, the feat
in which a 380-tonne jet can ‘lift people and cargo away from the
ground and across the sky’....Vanhoenacker invokes philosophers,
music, history, and his own past and family to convey the sense of
discovery and disorientation that he feels crisscrossing the globe
between Tokyo, Johannesburg, Los Angeles, London and the Arabian
Gulf....a riveting practitioner’s account of a human achievement
that has been rendered humdrum by its own success.”
The Scotsman
'Wonderfully evocative and clear-eyed...fascinating.'
Giles Foden, Conde Nast Traveller (UK)
“Not since Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s classic Vol de Nuit...has
there been such a fantastic book about flying as Mark
Vanhoenacker’s Skyfaring: A Journey With a Pilot....What marks this
book out is its author’s ability to bring a genuine poetic
sensibility to the experience of flying and the feelings of
strangeness and beauty that it engenders....Skyfaring takes the
genre to a whole new level. I found myself turning over the corners
of almost every page with excitement and admiration.”
The Bookseller (UK)
“This airborne odyssey in [Vanhoenacker’s] company is enthralling,
from the physics of lift and the vicissitudes of flight paths, to
St Elmo’s Fire, the Aurora Borealis, pristine sunsets, and the
fellow pilots he passes like ships in the night sky. Read it, and
you’ll find yourself requesting a window seat every time you
fly.”
Erica Wagner, The New Statesman (UK)
"Mark Vanhoenacker's Skyfaring reminds us of the magic of
aviation...fluid and elegant...full of information that is
wonderful in its simplicity...Flying planes isn’t just his job: it
remains his passion."
Libby Purves, BBC Radio 4 (UK)
"A longhaul airline pilot whose vision is unexpectedly poetic and
romantic...what stood out for me was that sense of wonder up
there...a rather lovely book."
Pilot Magazine (UK)
"A great read for absolutely everyone with an interest in
flying...a beautiful odyssey of observation...if you believe that
airline flying has become a monotonous, humdrum experience, the
victim of its own success perhaps, then reading this book will take
you to a fresh and thoughtful appreciation of the magic and
excitement of flight."
Ian Critchley, The Sunday Times (UK)
"Engaging, even poetic...Vanhoenacker’s passionate and beautifully
written book will remind even the most jaded traveller of the
wonder of flight."
Monocle
"What a great idea this is...a masterpiece of time, distance, palm
trees, frosty mornings, lofty ambition and self-effacing
charm."
Dan Glaun, MassLive.com
“A lyrical meditation on his work as a pilot for British Airways,
and takes readers through the routines and wonders of life in the
cockpit.”
Karen Brown, New England Public Radio
“Skyfaring… is essentially a love letter to the skies.”
Booklist
“Vanhoenacker…invites readers to join him in the cockpit of a 747
so that we might experience the oft-forgotten magic of flight. In
elegant and balanced prose, he meditates on every aspect of
aviation. The lift Vanhoenacker creates with his language is due to
the carefully constructed machinery of each chapter – the way in
which he balances personal narrative, research, and reverential
reflection… It is an artful and elevated look at the soul in
flight.”
Kirkus *starred review*
"This pilot is an accomplished stylistic acrobat who flies—and
writes—with the greatest of ease. The anatomy of an airliner and
peripatetic aerial travel, as well as sophisticated worldview,
combine for first-class reading—sure to enhance your next
flight."
Publishers Weekly
“In this intimate, often illuminating
piece, Slate columnist Vanhoenacker takes readers on a
personal tour of his world as an airline pilot....Vanhoenacker
conveys that sense of freedom, wanderlust, and traversing a large
world made small by travel, while at the same time demystifying the
inside of the cockpit and humanizing the all-powerful pilots
within....Packed with eloquent insight into a high-flying world.”
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