Fate is the Hunter Author: Visit Amazon's Ernest Kellogg Gann Page | Language: English | ISBN:
B0006AWY8U | Format: PDF
Fate is the Hunter Description
Review
V.S. Pritchett
New Statesman Mr. Gann is a writer saturated in his subject; he has the skill to make every instant sharp and important and we catch the fever to know that documentary writing does not often invite.
The New Yorker This book is an episodic log of some of the more memorable of [the author's] nearly ten thousand hours aloft in peace and (as a member of the Air Transport Command) in war. It is also an attempt to define by example his belief in the phenomenon of luck -- that "the pattern of anyone fate is only partly contrived by the individual."
New York Times Book Review Few writers have ever drawn their readers so intimately into the shielded sanctum of the cockpit, and it is here that Mr. Gann is truly the artist.
Cornelius Ryan author of
A Bridge Too Far and
The Longest Day Fate Is the Hunter is partly autobiographical, partly a chronicle of some of the most memorable and courageous pilots the reader will ever encounter in print; and always this book is about the workings of fate....The book is studded with characters equally as memorable as the dramas they act out.
Saturday Review This fascinating, well-told autobiography is a complete refutation of the comfortable cliché that "man is master of his fate." As far as pilots are concerned, fate (or death) is a hunter who is constantly in pursuit of them....There is nothing depressing about
Fate Is the Hunter. There is tension and suspense in it but there is great humor too. Happily, Gann never gets too technical for the layman to understand.
Chicago Sunday Tribune This purely wonderful autobiographical volume is the best thing on flying and the meaning of flying that we have had since Antoine de Saint-Exupéry took us aloft on his winged prose in the late 1930s and early 1940s....It is a splendid and many-faceted personal memoir that is not only one man's story but the story, in essence, of all men who fly.
--This text refers to the
Paperback
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From the Publisher
10 1.5-hour cassettes
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- Hardcover: 390 pages
- Publisher: Simon and Schuster (1961)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 1416534075
- ISBN-13: 978-1416534075
- ASIN: B0006AWY8U
- Product Dimensions: 9 x 6 x 1.4 inches
- Shipping Weight: 1.6 pounds
This classic ought to be read by every pilot. Not only is the prose superb but along the way he treats us to his Theory of Life
He regards life as a war -- an undeclared war against fate, the fate that hunts men down. "... One can never know when, where, or how fate will strike. Yet sooner or later it does...." Blind random events without a perceptable cause. FATE.
"Tell me now,... by what ends does a man ever partially controls his fate? It is obvious ... that favorites are played, but if this is so, then how do you account for those who are ill-treated? The worship of pagan gods, which once answered all this, is no longer fashionable. Modern religions ignore the matter of fate. So we are left confused and without direction".
Gann concludes, "Perhaps we should hide in childlike visions of afterlife wherein those pronounced good may play upon harps and those pronounced evil, stoke fires?" The first chapter sets the theme of the book. A mid-air collision is averted simply because Gann chose to descend 50 ft to his assigned altitude of 5,000 a few moments before. The other plane was just a tad sloppy. In these days before ATC and radar, it was all position reports. Why did Gann chose to descend? Why was the other pilot 50 ft high? His only explanation is FATE, and it is as good an answer as any. At these times, Gann says, "... diligently acquired scientific understanding is suddenly blinded and the medieval mind returns. In describing NTSB investigations of crashes, a cause always has to be arrived at, even when the investigators privately know that the true explanation is that "...some totally unrecognizable genie has once again unbuttoned his pants and urinated on the pillars of science".
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