Amer ica from the air

by Wolfgang Langewiesche

"In the early 1930s, Wolfgang Langewiesche, a German-born graduate student at the University of Chicago, learned to fly. He took to the air with the same passion Americans had taken to the road a decade earlier, writing a series of acclaimed books that described the heady excitement of flight in this era and the stunning views of his adopted country from an entirely new vantage point - the sky. America from the Air brings selections from two of these classic accounts - I'll Take the High Road, first published in 1939, and A Flier's World, his 1951 memoir - to provide a distinctive look at the American landscape before the construction of multilane expressways, suburban tract housing, and strip malls. With a photographer's eye and a rare talent for conveying the physical sensation of flying, Langewiesche describes small farms, deserted seashores, busy railway lines, and cities in which skyscrapers were still engineering marvels, evoking an irrecoverable part of America's past."--BOOK JA