Describe your new book: This book is the story of my life — the ups, the downs, and the music. If someone were to write your biography, what...
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I came to this book, which Salter characterizes in his preface as "...the story of a life. Not the complete story which...is beyond telling--the length would be too great, longer than Proust, not to speak of the repetition..." after reading the author's two exemplary novels of fighter pilots and flying, The Hunters, and Cassada, based on his own experience flying in the Korean War and in post-war Europe. In this book Salter gives us some of the details of the life which informed those novels, and it is a fascinating life, indeed, divided in the book about equally between his flying days and his life after he resigned his commission in the Air Force to pursue the life of writing, in Europe and America, which brought him into contact with James Jones, Irwin Shaw, Robert Redford (for whom he wrote the script of "Downhill Racer") and other luminaries of the last half century or so. Salter has earned the admiration of other writers as diverse as Joseph Heller, Susan Sontag, and Richard Ford, for prose which is impressionistic, beautiful, and elegiac. John Irving is quoted in the jacket copy thus: "No man who is even remotely honest with himself can read [this book] without envy; no woman of similar truthfulness will fail to find Salter's life deeply romantic." I would say that that is about right.
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Bob Newby has commented on (1) product.
Burning the Days: Recollection by James Salter
Bob Newby, September 1, 2011
I came to this book, which Salter characterizes in his preface as "...the story of a life. Not the complete story which...is beyond telling--the length would be too great, longer than Proust, not to speak of the repetition..." after reading the author's two exemplary novels of fighter pilots and flying, The Hunters, and Cassada, based on his own experience flying in the Korean War and in post-war Europe. In this book Salter gives us some of the details of the life which informed those novels, and it is a fascinating life, indeed, divided in the book about equally between his flying days and his life after he resigned his commission in the Air Force to pursue the life of writing, in Europe and America, which brought him into contact with James Jones, Irwin Shaw, Robert Redford (for whom he wrote the script of "Downhill Racer") and other luminaries of the last half century or so. Salter has earned the admiration of other writers as diverse as Joseph Heller, Susan Sontag, and Richard Ford, for prose which is impressionistic, beautiful, and elegiac. John Irving is quoted in the jacket copy thus: "No man who is even remotely honest with himself can read [this book] without envy; no woman of similar truthfulness will fail to find Salter's life deeply romantic." I would say that that is about right.