In this brilliant book of recollection, one of America's finest writers
recreates people, places, and events spanning some 50 years, bringing to
life an entire era through one man's sensibility. Scenes of love and
desire, friendship, ambition, life in foreign cities and New York, are
unforgettably rendered here in the unique style for which James Salter
is widely admired.
"Burning the Days" captures a singular life, beginning with a Manhattan
boyhood and then, satisfying his father's wishes, graduation from West
Point, followed by service in the Air Force as a pilot. In some of the
most evocative pages ever written about flying, Salter describes the
exhilaration and terror of combat as a fighter pilot in the Korean War,
scenes that are balanced by haunting pages of love and a young man's
passion for women. After resigning from the Air Force, Salter begins a
second life, becoming a writer in the New York of the '60s. Soon films
beckon. There are vivid portraits of actors, directors, and producers --
Polanski, Redford, and others. Here also, more important, are writers
who were influential, some by their character, like Irwin Shaw, others
because of their taste and knowledge.Ultimately "Burning the Days" is an
illumination of what it is to be a man, and what it means to become a
writer.Only once in a long while--Vladimir Nabokov's "Speak, MemoryOut
of Africa" --does a memoir of such extraordinary clarity and power
appear. Unconventional in form, "Burning the Days" is a stunning
achievement.
