Flights of Passage: Recollections of a World War II Aviator

Sam Hynes was eighteen when he left his Minnesota home for Navy flight school in 1943. By the time the war ended he was a veteran Marine pilot, still not quite twenty-one, and had flown more than a hundred missions in the Pacific theatre. In this eloquent narrative, by turns dramatic, funny and elegiac, Hynes recalls those extraordinary years during which he came of age. He makes real the places - the training fields and the liberty towns and the Pacific islands, and the people - the other young pilots, the girls and the young wives, even the enemy pilots. He remembers friendship, and the excitement and tedium of war, the high exhilaration of flying, and the dying. More than a tale of combat, Flights of Passage is a story of one boy's growth to manhood in the turbulent, testing world of war in the air.

About the Author :
Samuel Hynes was born in Chicago in 1924 and educated at the University of Minnesota and Columbia University. He served as a Marine Corps pilot from 1943-46 and 1952-53 and is the recipient of the Distinguished Flying Cross (for his war service) and a Robert F. Kennedy Award (for The Soldiers' Tale). He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and Woodrow Wilson Professor of Literature emeritus at Princeton University. His other books include A War Imagined, The Soldiers' Tale and The Growing Seasons.

Review :
'A consummate piece of war literature, with the feel of a turbulent time uncannily recreated ... conveys the wonder of flight with an understated lyricism' C.J. Fox, Independent 'His evocation of war, of witnessing death, of the last squalid days of fighting a beaten enemy, brings out the fullest compassion and the finest edge of his reporting. Flights of Passage must, without fail, be read' Richard Hough, Daily Telegraph 'Through [Hynes's] eyes, it's easy to understand why men cherish the red alert of war as a high point their lives will never again achieve, a time when the world seemed carefree and savage, passionate and disarming, with non-stop moments of hatred, love and deliverance' New York Times Book Review 'An unusual and moving book ... an authentic fragment, poignant and real, of a great and tumultuous past' Washington Post Book World