No Visible Horizon: Surviving the World's Most Dangerous Sport

Rating:
Summary: Six stars
Review: This is the real world of unlimited aerobatics -- inside the cockpit, infact inside the mind, body and soul of a pilot. Not a wanna-be or some academic, but a real pilot who placed in the nationals. a pilot who was also once the youngest senior editor at Time magazine, making the writing as smooth and as vivid and as captivating as watching a summer airshow. I could not put the book down. After writing this review, I'll go back and read the whole book again.

You do not need to be a pilot to read this book, as it is not a technical aerodynamic textbook. You just need to be human. You will enjoy the salty spicy taste on the tip of the tongue from being inside a sport that demands extreme physical and mental preparations. Maybe about once a decade someone connects flying and living with loving and dying. Writers like Saint-Exupéry, Gann, Bach. Now Ramo blasts into the box, and spins his wonderful dreams in the sky, the page, and deep into our souls. Yeah, I liked it.

Rating:
Summary: Surprisingly great
Review: What an interesting, thoughtful, engaging book. It reminds me of The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. I got this book from a pilot friend who recommended it as a great read even for people who aren't into flying or extreme sports, for that matter (I hate flying and he thought this might help a bit to see people do far more dangerous things in a plane than just take off, fly and land... it did help a bit).

The author writes about what makes people fly upside down five feet from the ground at hundreds of miles per hour and his own struggles with life and why he feels the need to do such things. I love his descriptions of the people in the aerobatics world. What a cast of characters. It is almost an anthropology book... as it lets you peek into a world totally foreign to most of the planet.

I loved this book and could barely put it down. The overly-technical stuff you can just skim if you aren't into it and get to the gems about his life, life and what makes people take risks. Great, great book.