Burning the Days: Recollection
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | 4.50 (846 Votes) |
| Asin | : | 0394759486 |
| Format Type | : | paperback |
| Number of Pages | : | 387 Pages |
| Publish Date | : | 2015-07-30 |
| Language | : | English |
DESCRIPTION:
"A typical Salter read" according to Pecksniff. If you love words as Salter does, crisp or mulled, sipped or drank but never gulped, always from very good casks, you'll enjoy this book. It is filled with so many people and memories that one can only marvel at his memory and the breadth of his life. Besides words, he is addicted to people who were somewhat famous or should have been,and especially to women. It is something of connective tissue to many of the books he's written, most of which I've read, so there's that if you are a devotee, but I think it can stand on its own.. Donald L. Phillips said Well written book for pliots or former pilots. A Superior lifetime recollections book. The part about flying is superior and pilots or former pilots will throughly enjoy the read.. "You can't do better" according to D. C. Carrad. than this talented but neglected author's autobiography. Missing from other reviews is a comment on the depth of feeling Salter has for military life. Perhaps only someone who has been in the service and left can understand his love for his comrades, how poignant his departure from what he thought would be his career and his life, and the vacuum afterward and how he coped with it. A perfectly-written and enlightening autobiography; worth 10,000 self-esteem books if you want to reflect on what it means to live your life properly.
More to the point, there are human beings, who tend to get semi-apotheosized by the sheer elegance of Salter's prose. To be sure, his early novels, such as The Hunters, failed to make Salter a household word. Still, he ran with literary lions like Irwin Shaw, drifted into the film business during the 1950s, and spent the next couple of decades ping-ponging from New York to Paris to Rome to Aspen and back. --James Marcus. For every Frank McCourt or Mary Karr or Tobias Wolff, there seem to be a dozen score-settling memoirists, many of them less interested in understanding the past than sinking a hatchet into it. As more and more reminiscences spill down the literary chute, it's clear that the Age of the Memoir has not yet abated. But his book differs in another way from the current crop of memoirs, which often feature a forbidding gauntlet of familial or societal travails. And even when the book flirts with frivoli
In some of the most evocative pages ever written about flying, Salter describes the exhilaration and terror of combat as a fighter pilot in the Korean War, scenes that are balanced by haunting pages of love and a young man's passion for women.After resigning from the Air Force, Salter begins a second life, becoming a writer in the New York of the 1960s. There are vivid portraits of actors, directors, and producers--Polanski, Robert Redford, and others. In this brilliant book of recollection, one of America's finest writers re-creates people, places, and events spanning some fifty years, bringing to life an entire era through