No Visible Horizon Surviving The Worlds Most Dangerous Sport

Download or read book No Visible Horizon written by Joshua Cooper Ramo and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2007-11-01 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The flying life has always demanded a passage across the razor's edge. At any moment you could slip to the other side: a gas leak, weather, fire in the cockpit. Sometimes what made the risks particularly horrible was that you could watch your mistakes play out in front of you, as a chorus of guilt followed you down. Usually you survived and could describe this music to others, but none of you -- not even with a long and growing trail of dead friends -- ever stopped flying. That was the truly unthinkable thing. In a good year aerobatics is one of the most beautiful sports imaginable. Pilots pull through impossibly elegant figures, twisting their planes at hundreds of miles an hour. The stress on their bodies reaches ten times the force of gravity, but this is nothing compared to the strain on their minds and the tension in their souls. In a bad year no sport kills more of its participants. To fly really well and to win you must depart the land of the possible and enter a place of pure faith. In this stunning literary debut, Joshua Cooper Ramo has crafted a meditation on the seduction of flight and a passionate love letter to a life of risk. It is partly the story of his own decision, after a decade of casual aerobatics, to transform himself into a serious competitive pilot aiming to finish high at the U.S. national competition. He introduces us to some of the greatest aerobatic pilots in the world: geniuses like Leo Loudenslager, a mild-mannered American Airlines pilot who spent his weekends redefining what it was possible to do in the air with a plane, flying figures so hard they made his eyes bleed as he whimpered with pain in the cockpit; or Kirby Chambliss, the Arizona pilot who performed figures just inches off the runway and sent his plane shooting through holes in cliffs. The classics of flight and extreme adventure, West With the Night; Wind, Sand, and Stars; and Into Thin Air have brought a poetic vision to their subjects. No Visible Horizon is an elegant and thrilling exploration, not simply of a pilot's physical battle against gravity, but of his dream of perfection and his quest for faith.

Download or read book More Book Lust written by Nancy Pearl and published by Sasquatch Books. This book was released on 2009-09-29 with total page 306 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Whether you’re searching for the perfect read for yourself or for a friend, More Book Lust offer eclectic recommendations unlike those in any other reading guide available. In this followup to the bestselling Book Lust, popular librarian, Nancy Pearl, offers a fresh collection of 1,000 reading recommendations in more than 120 thematic, intelligent and wholly entertaining reading lists. For the friend wanting to leave her job: "Living Your Dream" offers good armchair dreaming books about people who have left stodgy jobs to do what they love. Are you a budding chef? "Fiction For Foodies" includes books that sneak in a recipe or two along with a tantalizing plot. For the James Bond wannabe: "Crime is a Globetrotter" features crime novels set in various locations around the world such as Tibet, Sweden, and Sicily. In the book’s introduction, Pearl jokes, “If we were at a twelve-step meeting together, I would have to stand up and say, ‘Hi, I’m Nancy P., and I’m a readaholic.” Booklist magazine plays off this obsession while echoing a sentiment of Nancy Pearl’s fans everywhere: “A self-confessed ‘readaholic,’ Pearl lets us benefit from her addiction. May she never seek recovery.” Indeed.

Download or read book The Crowd Pleasers written by Pete Fusco and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2018-01-02 with total page 297 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An adventure-filled romp through one of aviation’s most notable, dangerous and entertaining pursuits: airshows! In the early days of aviation, all flights were airshows. Spectators gathered whenever a new flying machine attempted to leave the ground—the trick was to get them to pay. Takeoffs and landings did not sell tickets but people lined up, money in hand, to watch a “dip of death,” in which an aviator would dive from as high as he or she dared and pull up at the last second. Risk always sells and flying was man’s riskiest endeavor yet. From the start the “exhibition pilots” stood out. Everything about an aerobatic routine requires a degree of skill and a commitment to practice inconceivable to even most pilots, presenting innumerable risks to life and limb. And with risk, often, comes tragedy. The Crowd Pleasers is a sweeping history of air show accidents beginning in 1910 with the death of Charles Rolls, co-founder of Rolls-Royce, and ending in the present day. It brings to light some of the most notable air show accidents of all time and explores the aviators behind them. Their stories, their motivations. In so doing, it illuminates the role played by choice, social circumstance and fate in these often devastating accidents, and the lives attached to them. A must-read for all aviation buffs.

Download or read book Air & Space Smithsonian written by and published by . This book was released on 2003 with total page 454 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Gateway Heritage written by and published by . This book was released on 2003 with total page 588 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Books In Print 2004-2005 written by Ed Bowker Staff and published by R. R. Bowker. This book was released on 2004 with total page 3274 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book The Economist written by and published by . This book was released on 2003 with total page 478 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: