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HomeShop at BookSurgeBiography & AutobiographyAdventurers & ExplorersFlying With My Angel: Surviving Religion, Sex And Helicopters |
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Reliving my past Jul 12, 2008
Flying With My Angel has been a joy to read because I worked with Phil in PNG and SE Asia. The sights, sounds, smells and chaos that came with working in these countries are well written by Phil. The pilots mentioned in the book are people that I have spent years with enjoying the joys of bush helicopter flying and having that special bonding that happens when you share life or death situations. This is a story that will never happen again because it was all new at the time. Anyone that would like to experience what it was like to be a pioneer in helicopter aviation will enjoy this book
Coming of age over a lifetime Jul 06, 2008
This is a remarkably candid self portrait that begins in a bubble of leftover 19th century Australian outback. Latz has an unerring, inexhaustible drive to remake himself and a never-ending appetite for nurturing machinery. There's lots of drinking, lots of enticing girls, and lots of aircraft problems that summon his ingenious solutions. By testing himself at extremes, he passes through many incarnations, each time jettisoning the identity that others would like him to occupy. By far the hardest abandonment is leaving the religion of his parents, and all the visceral restrictions that go with it.
Graduating from cars to planes to helicopters, then to bigger and bigger helicopters, he redefines himself as if rising up a ladder a rung at a time. It's some sort of 20th century hunting and gathering whose principle he must have acquired from the aboriginal people he grew up with. Its momentum, however, leaves no time for contemplation and family life. The reckoning for all this comes when his wife leaves him.
The writing is spare and functional, like the life it describes. My wife and I both had the same reaction: we literally couldn't put it down. The flow of the book is addictive, and its honesty remarkable. The subtext is dancing with death, and escaping over and over again--with the uncanny implication that Latz has not escaped religion at all. He's simply redefined it through living. One cannot evade a spiritual dimension no matter how rationally and scientifically one lives. Some force which he calls an angel has cared for him, and now it's time to look around. There are rules to the universe and Latz, unknown to himself, finds that he plays by them--and the universe responds in kind.
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