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Recollection
Vintage
October 1998
On Sale: September 29, 1998
400 pages
ISBN: 0394759486
EAN: 9780394759487
Paperback
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Non-Fiction Biography
In this brilliant book
of recollection, one of America's finest writers re-creates
people,
places, and events spanning some fifty years, bringing to
life an
entire era through one man's sensibility. Scenes of love and
desire,
friendship, ambition, life in foreign cities and New York, are
unforgettably rendered here in the unique style for which
James Salter
is widely admired.
Burning the Days captures a singular life, beginning with a Manhattan boyhood
and then,
satisfying his father's wishes, graduation from West Point,
followed by
service in the Air Force as a pilot. In some of the most
evocative
pages ever written about flying, Salter describes the
exhilaration and
terror of combat as a fighter pilot in the Korean War,
scenes that are
balanced by haunting pages of love and a young man's passion
for women.
After
resigning from the Air Force, Salter begins a second life,
becoming a
writer in the New York of the 1960s. Soon films beckon.
There are vivid
portraits of actors, directors, and producers--Polanski, Robert
Redford, and others. Here also, more important, are writers
who were
influential, some by their character, like Irwin Shaw,
others because
of their taste and knowledge.
Ultimately Burning
the Days is an illumination of what it is to be a man,
and what it means to become a writer.
Only
once in a long while--Vladimir Nabokov's Speak, Memory or Isak
Dinesen's Out of Africa--does a memoir of such extraordinary
clarity
and power appear. Unconventional in form, Burning the
Days is a
stunning achievement by the writer The Washington Post Book
World said
"inhabits the same rarefied heights as Flannery O'Connor,
Paul Bowles,
Tennessee Williams and John Cheever" --a rare and
unforgettable book.
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