Jim Atkins

Ernest Gann was an airline co-pilot and pilot before World War II and flew all over the world as a military transport flyer attached to the Army Air Forces. His flying stories are utterly riveting, but the true beauty of the book is the flow of his prose. Gann's words flow off the page with a kind of languid coolness, appropriate for a high priest of The Right Stuff, decades before that was defined by Tom Wolfe. This is one of the books I like to read just to revel in the the stylishness of his writing.