Burning the Days : Recollection

Rating:
Summary: Brilliant
Review: This is a must read for anyone even remotely associated with West Point. His description of Beast Barracks could very well have been written about the one I experienced nearly thirty years later:
...an ominous noise, alive, that flared when the door was
opened like the roar of a furnace.
Later chapters are filled with sadness and ultimately regret; but an honest accounting of one's life must necessarily be so.
Throughout, the writing never falters. He has taken his own advice and removed everything that was good enough, leaving, for us, the best.

Rating:
Summary: Days yet to be burned
Review: This was my first James Salter book and it will not be the last. Burning the Days is the beautifully written story of a life, and how that life was shaped by people and places dear to all of us. Each chapter is a vivid chronicle of some phase of time, written in a style that flows like liquid poetry: nostalgic recollections of a friend who was last seen during the war and then never heard from again, or a place in Europe that one has ventured back to one last time, knowing he will never return again. All of these memories come together in this memoir of days recalled and thus burned forever. Only those things truly dear and everlasting to the author have not been written about- the days yet to be burned.