Rating: 
Summary: You can't do better...
Review: ...than this talented but neglected author's autobiography. Missing from other reviews is a comment on the depth of feeling Salter has for military life. Perhaps only someone who has been in the service and left can understand his love for his comrades, how poignant his departure from what he thought would be his career and his life, and the vacuum afterward and how he coped with it. A perfectly-written and enlightening autobiography; worth 10,000 self-esteem books ... if you want to reflect on what it means to live your life properly.
Rating:
Summary: A Unique Education: Flying, Film, Europe, Women, Books
Review: Autobiography, memoir...there is probably a better word to describe this fascinating book by the always fascinating James Salter. The early chapters covering the authors youth and education are somewhat conventional. The flying years are exciting. But the real heart of this book is the 75 page long chapter titled UKIYO which is a highly condensed telling of Salters film career and novel writing career. In that chapter you really get to see what makes Salter tick. He reveals his life not in the telling of personal details but by sharing with you the fascination and admiration he has for certain people, certain qualities. In that chapter one sees the importance of Europe and Europeans in the shaping of his sensibility. That chapter is one portrait after another of personalities brimming with life and it reads like a second and more interesting kind of education. The most interesting figures are not necessarily the names you will recognize though there are plenty of those. Salter as observer and absorber of life is not necessarily attracted to those who achieved greatness in their fields, he is more interested in those that achieved a greatness of character which is a very telling glimpse into this writers value system.
From days in the cockpit to days lunching with film stars in Rome to the final scene of writer with longtime companion and friends, this is a writer who has been attracted and dedicated to living first and writing second. The various aspects and phases of Salters life are not all integrated into a single linear narrative rather they remain somewhat separate chapters of an experience and event rich life that is still being lived. As a writer he just keeps getting better. I sense just as Nabokov wrote Speak, Memory before embarking on his final masterpiece Salter too will follow this memoir with a career crowning work of his own.
Rating:
Summary: A read-before-you-die book
Review: I find it amusing to see how some people take this man's extraordinary lyrical gift for granted - as if prose poets of his caliber could be found in any issue of People magazine. Let's be clear about this: there is *no one* making more beautiful music with the magnificent instrument of the English language than James Salter. If this book were nothing more than a factual recounting of his life story, it would still be a greatly rewarding reading experience.It is, in fact, a great deal more than that. Like Casanova's immortal memoir, this is the work of an old man looking back on the dazzling life he relished but which has vanished forever. As such, a funereal darkness lurks behind every sunlit memory, an abyss of ruin underneath every bejewelled sentence. There is a sad wisdom in these pages that makes "Burning the Days" a timeless classic, belonging to no one generation but to all.
Rating:
Summary: Perfect. But Better Each Time.
Review: I've read the book twice. And after meeting the author briefly at a reading this weekend I've picked it up a third time. It seems new and better, and still crushes with a visceral weight. Read it again if you were unsure of it once.
Rating:
Summary: Perfect. But Better Each Time.
Review: I've read the book twice. And after meeting the author briefly at a reading this weekend I've picked it up a third time. It seems new and better, and still crushes with a visceral weight. Read it again if you were unsure of it once.
Rating:
Summary: A Riveting Work of Art
Review: Like I do with so many books, I initially judged "Burning the Days" by its cover. I saw the faded photography of a mid-century writer, handsome and strong. I witnessed the mountains of praise heaped upon him by the greatest of newspapers. I couldn't believe that I had never heard of this guy. So many great discoveries take place in this way. I picked up the book and blazed through it immediately. Salter recounts a life of ferocious masculinity. He paints a canvas of female conquests with the most delicate of colors. He uses language that is so prosaic, so utterly beautiful, that any writer worth his salt would do well to plagiarize. You find yourself re-reading episodes in the man's life as if they were your own, perhaps in another, more interesting incarnation. In fact, the work is ultimately depressing, because you realize how little you have seen and done in your own life compared to this man. I feel sorry for memoirists whose lives can only be pedestrian in comparison.
Rating:
Summary: a reflection in the mind's eye
Review: Salter has had the life to which many men would envy. It is spread out over the last half of the twentieth century, buttressed by an education at West Point, flying the first generation of fighter jets over Korea. This followed by a free wheeling existence chasing adventure and experience across the globe as a writer of screenplays and short stories. This book is a memoir of life consumed first hand, with a ravenous appetite but also with insight and compassion. Salter can take on the role of an objective onlooker to his personal drama, a critical one where warranted. There seems to be a degree of separation between the experiences he is describing and the sensibilities of the present author, as if seen in a mirror's reflection. One shaded by a patina of the luster and discretion of life's lessons. The book is presented in episodes, an elegant prose laying the mortar between himself and the people he has known and relationships he has had. This is a testament of personal growth, an appreciation of old friends. The frailties and complexities of his pilgrimage are movingly expressed, and this expression is the source of the book's power. His literary style is simple and clear without shedding the ethereal and romantic. There is a unique geography to Salter's writing, a spare and arid narrative lead into and out of oases of great erudition, eloquence and emotional impact. The seductions, though, of early notoriety, fast times, and in-crowds took their toll in diversion and dissolution of creative energy. This might explain the lack of a more significant identity and opus from such a gifted writer, known and justifiably admired more by his co-writers than the general public.
Rating: 
Summary: What a great illustration of how to burn off your fuel
Review: The book talks about the life of Jimmy, a New Yorker who later graduated from West Point Academy. Jimmy walked through his boyhood in private Catholic schools and summer camps, where he was exposed to the picture of a real world. He discovered the hardship an individual must overcome in order to survive, especially in the circumstance when the individual have to fight against other for a living. Miraculously, Jimmy became an air force major after graduated from West Point Academy. He experienced both wars: the war that existed in oversea (Korean War), and the psychological war. This war complicated him with broken relationship. This was a kind of unreachable relationship that left him with a sense of betrayal and failure, but at the same time it taught him valuable lessons about life. After all, he was unsatisfied with his accomplishment in the air force. He finally realized that his aspiration to be able to write was his ultimate goal because it gave him the opportunity to express his feelings and his personal experiences. As the result, Jimmy became a writer not too long after he retired from the air force.
In the book, James Salter applied several different methods to construct the thesis. He critically wrote the story in different period of time. He switched it back and forth between the past and the present. This technique made the readers question about the transition in Jimmy's past and how the past had an effect on the way he perceived life. In my personally view, the beginning of the book gave me different stages of excitement, however, the points were sporadically mentioned as I moved on. Consequently, the end of the book was quite redundant. On the other hand, the author used large amount of vocabulary, which can be definitely beneficial to one's knowledge.
Rating:
Summary: I'm Insanely Jealous of This Man
Review: The first question I have about this book is where was Salter's wife when he was carrying on all the adulterous affairs he had? She is almost never mentioned. We do encounter, however, an incredibly interesting number of people, many of whom are famous: Robert Redford, Irwin Shaw, James Jones, Vanessa Redgrave, are only a few. And then there are the dazzling descriptions of the restaurants, hotels, residences and cities of Europe. The food that was eaten, the wine that was drunk, and the conversations had on literature, writing and film making. These are complimented by Salter's experiences as a pilot, flying in the States, Europe and across deserts in Africa. All of it, delivered in an often brilliant, dizzying prose. There is no doubting James Salter lived an interesting life and drank from the lees more than most of us, and yet the one defect of this rich memoir is its morally flawed author. Salter seems to have not the slightest hesitation in sleeping with someone's wife or betraying his own wife for that matter. Adultery seems almost par for the course of being someone who is someone. Knowledge of women (many women), like knowledge of books and wines, seems almost a requirement to being cultured, to having truly lived. Which is perfectly acceptable, I suppose, if that's what you believe. But the problem is that the most emotionally honest part of this book comes when Salter briefly mentions the death of his daughter. The pain in his words stand in counterbalance to all the frivolity of his affairs throughout the book. And I found myself thinking that Salter would have done his daughter much better if he had never betrayed his wife, had never run off to Europe and other places for months at a time and sipped wine from golden goblets with genuises and moviestars. It's a consideration I believe Salter takes into account also. The book succeeds because the author does not try to recapture the past (the days that he has burned away) or to ever justify his actions, but only the impressions that they have left him. And so if we are not given the whole picture, we are at least presented with a small part of the indelible proof of a life remembered, and the wisdom gained by having lived it.
Rating: 
Summary: A Crash Landing
Review: This book has been recommended to me by several friends and the other reviews listed by Amazon are nearly unanimous in their praise for the book, but after the first one hundred pages I was bored out of my mind. Salter is a very good writer, his prose are excellent, but the subject matter was repetitive and dull. His discussion of his youth, days at West Point, and early career as a fighter pilot is engaging and make for a great book. Unfortunately that only fills half the book and from there Salter wanders aimlessly describing the various friends he made and what he was doing from day to day in his thirties and forties. His anecdotes about his military service lose their vitality and then after he is discharged from the army his life becomes dull. The final chapters of the book read like a social register in which hundreds of notable people are mentioned, but none really add anything substantial to the overall story. Salter has certainly lived an interesting life, but it was not worth my time or money to read about it here.
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