Flights of Passage: Recollecti

by SamuelHynes (Author)

• Used

  Paperback
  2003

  $15.71

• Used

  Paperback
  2005

  $3.32

  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.

• Used

  Hardcover
  1988

  $3.32

  Sam Hynes was a young Marine bomber pilot in World War II. He flew more than 100 missions against the Japanese. He was just 18 when he left home to learn to fly and 21 at the war's end. In this memoir, he remembers the sensations he experienced in his rites of passage from untrained cadet to war-weary aviator, from innocence to manhood. He presents portraits of his fellow aviators, of the wonder of flying and of the madness of war. Samuel Hynes is author of The Auden Generation and Edwardian Occasions and editor of the three volume Complete Poetical Works of Thomas Hardy .