In this brilliant book of recollection, one of America's finest writers
re-creates 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 1960s. Soon films beckon.
There are vivid portraits of actors, directors, and producers--Polanski,
Robert 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, Memory or
Isak Dinesen's Out of Africa--does a memoir of such extraordinary
clarity and power appear. Unconventional in form, Burning the Days is
a stunning achievement by the writer The Washington Post Book World
said "inhabits the same rarefied heights as Flannery O'Connor, Paul
Bowles, Tennessee Williams and John Cheever"--a rare and unforgettable
book.
