Flyboys

Rating:
Summary: This is just a great story. I loved it!
Review:

Tom Hanley is a natural-born writer. His style is his own, but his sense of humor is delightful and he understands kids. He still remembers what it was like to be ten or twelve years old and full of Walter Mitty fantasies which could kick in anywhere, anytime. Even during math class.

This story rings true except for the far-fetched adventure of flying an RB-47H to check out Cuba, but even then it is just plausible enough that you want it to be true.

The kid language rings true for the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis. Lord! Can that have been 40 years ago?

These are "Air Force brats" caught up in the world of the cold war, the big missile crisis, the aviation culture and the innocence of puberty in a world of Mutually Assured Destruction.

I hope Tom Hanley continues to write. I suspect that he is a latter day Samuel Clemens. He surely has an instinct for humor and a propensity for expressing himself with great clarity.

Joseph H. Pierre
author of The Road to Damascus

Rating:
Summary: Superb and Informational.
Review: As a female Military Brat who lived on Forbes Air Force Base in the mid-50s, I loved this book. Tom Hanley paints wonderful word pictures of a young boy's fantasies that had me laughing so hard, I was practically falling out of my chair. My Dad was an AF pilot, so the "flyboy" terms were familiar to me. But it isn't necessary to have that background to enjoy the story.

Rating:
Summary: The Wild Blue Yonder Was Never Wilder or More Yonder
Review: As Bobby, the aircraft commander stood in front of General Curtis Lemay, the head of SAC summed things up this way: "Well gentlemen, it seems that here's what we have so far: one stolen B-47 with major damage, from the looks of it. An overflight of Cuba, for God's sake! One extremely important ceremony ruined for all the wide world to see. Krushchev is bonkers. Castro is apoplectic. I got VIP's in ambulances. I got VIP's cryin. I got VIP's flat on their backs and blubbering like idiots...Reporters from every hick town from here to Florida are talking about major damage. Cows. Chickens. Barns, Glass..."

So, how did all of this take place? What is the story behind this trail of terror and destruction? That's what you need to find out by getting this book and giving yourself one fine and enjoyable read. You'll thank me if you do.

I'll give a you a clue. Well, the cover of the book does that as well. The aircraft commander is 12. Think that makes it too much of a stretch? The rest of his crew is about the same. Ridiculous?
I assure you it is not and if you will open the first page and start reading, by the end of the book everything will make perfect sense and you will have been highly entertained by a very talented writer.

Rating:
Summary: Now that was a lot of fun to read!!!!!!!
Review: The story is well written and a lot of fun to read. Tom Hanley gets to the heart of what it was like (for those of us who are now adults)to be an adolescent male. Not only was the story a lot of fun, but it in this case Tom captures the spirit of the young age of discovery of a boy. The book starts out almost plausable and gets fantastic at a rapid pace. The action and fun make the book difficult to put down except for those interruptions of out-loud laughter. The book contains enough factual information about aircraft so that it is actually interesting in another way as well. Young readers will probably miss some of the allusions to topics they don't have the age to look back on yet.

My suggestion to Tom is, "Please write another story, we await its release"

JDP

Rating:
Summary: skilled writing and a wonderful story!
Review: This book was given to me as a gift, and I was absolutely taken by it from the first page. The other reviews are all true that Flyboys is a hilarious fantasy, but I found it much more. First of all, the dialogue is so wonderfully true to the time - when was the last time you heard 'bozo-brain?' I grew up in Iowa in the early 60s and the language is perfect - no 'four-letter' words at all (we really didn't!) Another thing is that this is a terrific 'growing up Catholic' story. These are fun to do, and there are a lot of them, but Flyboys is delightful. Hanley gets us into the head of young adolescents so well, it is a memory-ride for us who were there. The daydreams of glory, the peanut butter sandwiches, nuns shooting 'invisible beams of atomic-nun energy rays'. It seems so innocent now, were we really like that? His comedy timing is on par with the master, Mark Twain, and Dave Barry, that is how good it is. I was laughing so hard in places I had to put the book down. The descriptions of the airplane and flight are simply great. You would pooh-pooh the idea that 3 young kids could start up and fly a jet like a B-47 until you read how it is done. Follow the checklist! The banter between the boys in the cockpit is so real. some want to go ahead, some want to 'chicken-out' so they take a vote and go! This is where it gets a little unbelievable, but once again Hanley writes with such conviction, you wonder if it couldn't actually happen. Beautiful descriptions of flying, and really good characters on the ground as well, witnessing the flight along the route. Besides the boys and the nuns, we get a hilarious dose of Billy Bob up in a silo, a deaf lady who gets her hearing back, cows on the loose, cigar-chomping Gen. LeMay, assorted air force types (including a hilarious episode when a New York Air Police gives chase in a leaky 'piece of s--- Dodge truck'). There is also a cast of commies (Gen Vodka Buttinski and Steveski Khunyin-Steve Canyon, get it?) and LBJ and JFK and CLINTON! and well, the cast goes on and naturally, our heroes save the day. I won't tell you the ending, but once you read it will all make perfect sense. I recommend this book very much. What a movie this would make!

Rating:
Summary: skilled writing and a wonderful story!
Review: This is probably the only book that I've ever read that had no uneccessary shmut. It wasn't just wholesome, it conveyed strong characters, a good background, an exciting plot and cherishable diction. The portrayal of the characters and how they percieve life around them is gripping to the reader, as well as fun. Yes, I said it, something that wasn't about sex, drugs or violence can actually be fun!
I couldn't put it down.

Rating:
Summary: Wholesome, Non-shmut Book of the Year
Review: This is probably the only book that I've ever read that had no uneccessary shmut. It wasn't just wholesome, it conveyed strong characters, a good background, an exciting plot and cherishable diction. The portrayal of the characters and how they percieve life around them is gripping to the reader, as well as fun. Yes, I said it, something that wasn't about sex, drugs or violence can actually be fun!
I couldn't put it down.

Rating:
Summary: Tom (Sawyer) Meets the Cuban Missile Crisis
Review: This starts out like a comic book with a comic book hero, Maj Tom Riley, USAF, shooting down MiGs in his F-86 Sabre jet fighter, chortling at his superiority over Col Tomb, "a commie sack of dog poop." It continues as a fifties sit com as our hero wakes up and find himself a seventh-grader living on an Air Force base in Kansas with two little sisters and two little bothers and a perfect sit com mom who looks like Elizabeth Taylor, "but unlike Liz, she sang soprano at church, could antique furniture, mated for life...[and] her famous coconut cake always got top dollar at Bake Sales." As Tom gets ready for school the third person narrative becomes something like Huck Finn's first person, circa 1962, as he is told by his mom to apologize to his sister for elbowing her. "Sheesh. No way around it," he laments under his breath. When mom tells him to wait for his sisters for school, he dead pans to himself, "Jeesh, have a cow, why doncha?"

One is beginning to wonder at this point if Tom Hanley, novelist, is for real, or is he just putting us on? Is this satire, or is this guy unconscious? We next get a full day at Saint Luke middle school with Sister Redempta, terminal boredom, girls "starting to grow, you know...Breasts!" and Tom making like Walter Mitty with the heroic fantasies, this time reeling in a 2,000 pound, plus marlin with an 8-lb. test line. And then we have Chapter 4, "The Oval Office." It's the Cuban missile crisis and we're in the war room with JFK and his Boston accent and there's the Joint Chiefs and MacNamara and Schlesinger (no doubt taking copious notes) and they're all making like characters from Dr. Strangelove. LBJ hurries in, tucking in his shirt, wondering "what the sam-hill" is "going on." Marilyn Monroe (!) makes a discreet exit from close proximity to JFK, turning to breathe out "a throaty, Yes sir, Mr. President sir" as the assembled "loins of the most powerful men in the free world stirred as one."

By now I've figured out what's going on. Hanley is having one hellsapoppin' good time recounting a fantasy boy's life as a gee whiz fun satirical novel (with perhaps a grownup fantasy of Steven Spielberg taking a six-figure option on it, which might happen: Spielberg loves kids and he'd like nothing more than to remake the Kubrick/Terry Southern classic in a more Spielbergian style). But I have a feeling that some of this may have gone over the head of a few readers, particularly when one considers that the author bills himself on the cover as "an artist, writer, surfer, pilot, and a regular guy," a Boy Scout Tenderfoot and a Leo "--but not one of those, you know, loud and pushy ones." This guy could actually BELIEVE this stuff he's writing, one imagines. He sure as hell ain't no fancy-smarmy pseudo intellectual from Harvard Yard.

The prose glitters with authentic detail and a kind of all fools wisecracking ("holy cats, ching-gow, correct-a-mundo, no problemo, danged" this and "danged" that, and even "darnit," etc., etc. and nearly ad infinitum). Particularly funny was the take off by the kids on the neologism, "eat me!" on pages 56 and 57. Hanley returns the early sixties, BH (Before Hippies), which are really the fifties, as though well-remembered or well-researched, and makes the words run across the page in a readable and agreeable manner. (By the way, great job of proofreading by somebody.)

While this is not any nouveau artistic accomplishment, this is a fun read that really would make a swell comedy for the silver screen even though things do get a little fantastic as the plot unravels and even though an ex-US President (Lyndon Baines Johnson) does take some terrible satirical licks en route (ha, ha) and even though General Curtis E. LeMay is quoted as saying stuff like, "What in blazes do you mean?" and even though there's not a single f-word to be found anywhere nor any dope, drugs, booze or--heck--even any rock and roll. Bottom line, if you don't like this novel, you must be a girl!