This is a new one as far as I know!!! What's the best book you ever read?? My vote is "Grass Beyond the Mountains" by Rich Hobson about 2 Wyoming cowboys that went to central BC in the 30's. The only book I've read more than once. My second is Michener's "Alaska".
How 'bout it??
Mike
This was a good thread on the subject a while back.
http://www.supercub.org/phpBB2/viewt...ght=books+read
Steve Pierce
"When everything seems to be going against you, remember that the airplane takes off against the wind, not with it."
Henry Ford
"The Seven Mysteries of Life" by Guy Marchie
'An Old Captivity' by Nevil Shute Norway (Nevil Shute)
and
'The Moon is a Harsh Mistress' by Robert A. Heinlein
"Grey Sea's Under" by Farley Mowat
"Song of the Sky"...... Guy Murchie
Best book I ever read...bar NONE is Ernie Gann's "Fate is the Hunter".
Should be REQUIRED reading with 100 question test for anyone applying for Air Transport license.
Also...flew Mitchner and entourage around the state when he was "researching" his book "Alaska" (research done by "assistants").
Book is so MUCH BS
Cloud(tell it like it IS)Dancer
Cloudy, Michener's "Alaska" is fiction, right? which equals "BS", right.
Still, I enjoyed it the 2 times I read it.
......and I enjoy your writing style too.DMC
Yeah, sort of. It's "historical fiction" which purports to be an accurate if fictionalized account of history. I stopped reading Alaska after about the third thing I read which was presented as fact (rather than part the fiction part) which I knew not to be accurate. I have a very low tolerance for inaccurate crap. Michener's come a long way (down) since The Guns of Toko-RiOriginally Posted by Dave Calkins
The Bible.
Favorite Chapter - Romans
Bill
The Little Red Hen.
I have read this book hundreds of times, required reading for our children and perhaps the entitlement crowd.
In Bill's Book it's covered in 2 Thes. 3-10
Shadow Divers. A fairly recent book about deep diving and a "mystery" U-Boat. Fantastic book.
I have to agree with C-D's assessment of Michener's Alaska. There are a number of very poorly researched details in that book which illustrate clearly that they simply didn't do their research well at all. There were so many just blatant errors with relation to extremely cold weather that you KNOW that neither Michener nor his assistants ever actually experienced real cold weather. They just got it totally wrong.
I was in Kodiak when Michener was grinding the book out. He came to Kodiak to "research" for the book. He arrived in the afternoon, did a presentation at the library that evening, and left first thing in the morning. Lots of "research" on the Russian/Alaskan period there, of course. I'm sure he stayed up late. What a farce. And, many of the details in that section of the book were just wrong as well.
Michener's early books were well researched and excellent books. Unfortunately, he got into the production line business to crank out as many books as possible as fast as possible, and the later books suffered as a consequence. He is a great story teller, so it's unfortunate that he allowed such sloppy research to color his later books. Its' what happens when you get in a hurry with anything, I suppose.
MTV
The Odyssey, by Homer.
Classic, epic, poetic.
Cheers,
One thing I can say about "Grass Beyond the Mountains", is that it was written by one of the cowboys that it's about. While I'm sure Hobson took some liberties in his descriptions of condidtions, his geography is right on and very interesting. Most interesting is the fact that the "Home Ranch" is still about like it was 70 years ago. No roads, other than a wagon trail into it. Rich Hobson and "Pan" Phillips became ledgends in the Cariboo-Chilcotin area of BC.
I know many of you have visited the Phillips Fish Camp still run by Pan's son.
Mike
Mike
Your post sparked a recollection of something I was told by a moose guide that I have hunted with many times in BC. He claims that one of my favorite areas we have hunted was the haunt of Pan Philipps. It is roughly 100 miles south of Vanderhoof. Does the book describe the location? I have killed a few smaller moose in the area but the last one was fair with 3 and 4 eyegurds and 22 points. Love that country beyond measure.
That's the place. Lies from the Blackwater River through the Ilgatchuz and Itcha mountain ranges to the town of Anahim Lake. Pan's daughter, Diana Phillips just put out a book about her life growing up on the Home Ranch with her family. Amazingly tough people. "Beyond the Chilcotin" available from Amazon.
Mike
"Sand County Almanac"...
read it at least every other year and find something new every time. As I get older and more "experienced" the wisdom seems to become more relevant. R
To go up...pull stick back. To go down...pull stick all the way back!
www.TheCubWorks.com
'The last place on earth'... dont remember the auther. Its about the race to the south pole.
'Disaster at the pole'... dont remember who wrote that either, but its a very good read. The polar explorers were a tough (or stupid) bunch.
Like my boss used to tell me on a regular basis, "if your gona be dumb, you better be tough".
Greg
North to the Orient, by Anne Morrow Lindbergh.
Anne.
Baloney is still baloney, no matter how thin you slice it.
Bruce McCall's Zany Afternoons
http://search.barnesandnoble.com/boo...=9780760716991
For those of you who like novels with an aviation bent, take a look at Shute's 24 novels and his autobiography (Sliderule). in addition to being the best selling author in the English language at the time of his death in 1962, in his earlier years he had been founder, CEO, and chief design engineer at Airspeed, Ltd. before WWII, when it was one of the largest aircraft manufacturing firms in the world (Airspeed was forced to merge with DeHavilland at the beginning of the war). Most of his books involve aviation in one form or another, and he writes as well as Gann (sold much better than Gann). Some of the movies made from his books are No Highway in the Sky (which foretold fatigue failures in commercial airliners about 18 months before the first BOAC Comet crashes)., A Town Like Alice, Pied Piper, On The Beach, The Legacy, and a number of others. His book An Old Captivity details a 1934 bushplane flight from Oxford, England to New York by way of Scotland, Iceland, Greenland, and Canada. A really good read.
Glacier Pilot - Beth Day
very good and have not seen anyone mention it as of yet.
Glacier Pilot is a good one.Bob Reeve became Don Sheldon's father in law.Anyone know how accurate Don's story[Wager With The Wind] is ?
I also agree with the post about Fate Is The Hunter,excellent book.
Last Of The Bush Pilots by Harmon Helmericks is a favorite.
Into Thin Air by Jon Krakauer I got altitude sickness just reading it. Also had to put on a jacket and hat inside.
I enjoyed "Flight of Passage" by Buck. Great story about a couple adventurous boys flying accross the country in a Cub.
Snert, I felt the same way reading Into Thin Air. At one point I was in the house by the wood stove and felt cold. Excellent book
Tim
Tim
Also had to keep a dictionary by my side.
He does have a vocabulary.
Another mountain climbing true story that causes lack of sleep is
"Addicted to Danger" by Jim Wickwire. I rate it better than Krakauer's book which is very good. If you get 4 pages into this one you're hooked!!
The cover photo alone will chill your sh***!!!
Mike
"Grass Beyond the Mountains" by Rich Hobson: as pointed out earlier, about the BC ranching adventures of Hobson & "Pan" Phillips. A few years back, there was a Canadian TV series (loosely) based on that story called "Nothing Too Good For a Cowboy" that ran for a couple seasons. Good entertainment, I thought, kind of an adventure/comedy. Current TV hottieSarah Chalke from "Scrubs" co-starred as Hobson's wife (and Pan's nemesis). Reruns were on CBC for a few years afterward too, haven't seen any in quite a while, they musta run their course.
Pan Phillips Fishing Resort used to advertise in the back of the GA News. I think they're located at Lake Quesnel or Anaheim Lake in BC.
Rooster
"Northstar over my Shoulder" and "Flying through Midnight."
How do Kamikazi pilots practice?
If you have read 'Into Thin Air' then reading 'The Climb' is a must. It is written by the Russian from the same party.
'BEST BOOK' for me is a long list of fine reading.
Pete
"Log of a Pasture Pilot" by Gordon Baxter, hands down. "Maverick" by Dennis Marvicsin second. I like Ernie Gann's & Richard Bach's books as well.
Tried to read some of the stuff by St. Ex... Got bored and couldn't get through it. Maybe it was just the translation.
Along the lines of some of the suggestions above:
"Enemy Coast Ahead" by Guy P. Gibson
"Lonely Vigil" by Walter Lord
"The Right Stuff" by Tom Wolf
"Flight of Passage" by Rinker Buck
"Reach for the Sky" and "Fly for your Life" by Paul Brickhill
"Tale of a Guinea Pig" by Geoffrey Page
"Goodbye, Darkness" by William Manchester
"Stranger to the Ground" and "Nothing by Chance" by Richard Bach
"A Storm in Flanders" by Winston Groom
"Wahoo" and "Clear the Bridge" by Richard O'Kane
"Tales of the South Pacific" by James Michener
"The Killer Angels" by Michael Shaara
All of these are well written narratives that will hold you from the first page to the last.
I second "lonesome Dove" Read it a couple times. All of Capstick's book were good reads. Nicholas Evans "The Loop and "the Smoke Jumper" and "The Divide" are entertaining. A B Guthrie has several great western novels like "the was west but the best book I have read lately is Doug Stanton's "Horse Soldiers" about some US soldiers in Afghanistan. One of the worst things about getting old is my eyes can't take all nighters reading a great book like they used to.
Dave
An exciting climbing book is Minus 148, by Art Davidson. True story, written by one of the participants, takes place on Denali.
The best book by "St. Ex" is The Little Prince.
Anne.
Baloney is still baloney, no matter how thin you slice it.
Yes, both books give you a blood chilling look into high altitude mountaineering. Minor point: Boukreev was a memeber of a different climbing party which was on Everest at the same time as Krakauer's group. Another book which details that same disaster (but isn't exclusively about that) is High Exposure by David Brashear, who was in the IMAX filming party climbing Everest at the time.
Into the Wild, also by Krakauer was good, and has some local relevance to those of us in Alaska. It was the story of the guy who went off down the Stampede trail by Healy and his body was found in an old abandoned bus by a hunter that fall.
Yeah, I'd be hard pressed to find a "best" book among many I've read.
If you are into climbing books you would also want to read " Left for Dead" by Beck Weathers. He was in the Krakauer group. An excellent read. Also go to the IMAX website and find and see the movie Everest, that was filmed by Brashiers and Viesturs. Awesome cinematography. Viestures book is also good. " No Shortcuts to the top" Also "Seven Summits" by Bass, Wells and Ridgeway. "View From The Summit" Sir Edmund Hillary's book and also Tenzing Norgay's book " Tenzing"
The book "Marley and Me" is probably the all time funniest book I have ever read. Highly recommended.
Tons of good books and so little time.
"Three Men in a Boat"
Piper J-5A C-90 N40877
J-5 Project Pictures
"Alaskan-Yukon Trophies Won And Lost", by G.O. Young - personally dedicated to me by Jim (Hoppy) Harrower!
Second would be "Alaska's Wolf Man, The 1915 - 55 Wilderness Adventures of Frank Glaser", by Jim Rearden.
Third is "Trinity", by Leon Uris.
Si
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