Imagine a City
A Pilot's Journey Across the Urban World
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3.7 • 3 Ratings
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- $8.99
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- $8.99
Publisher Description
This love letter to the cities of the world—from the airline pilot–author of Skyfaring—is "a journey around both the author's mind and the planet's great cities that leaves us energized, open to new experiences and ready to return more hopefully to our lives" (Alain de Botton, author of The Art of Travel).
In his small New England hometown, Mark Vanhoenacker spent his childhood dreaming of elsewhere— of the distant, real cities he found on the illuminated globe in his bedroom, and of one perfect metropolis that existed only in his imagination. These cities were the sources of endless comfort and escape, and of a lasting fascination. Streets unspooled, towers shone, and anonymous crowds bustled in the places where Mark hoped he could someday be anyone—perhaps even himself.
Now, as a commercial airline pilot, Mark has spent nearly two decades crossing the skies of our planet and touching down in dozens of the storied cities he imagined as a child. He experiences these destinations during brief stays that he repeats month after month and year after year, giving him an unconventional and uniquely vivid perspective on the places that form our urban world.
In this intimate yet expansive work that weaves travelogue with memoir, Mark celebrates the cities he has come to know and to love, through the lens of the hometown his heart has never quite left. As he explores emblematic facets of each city’s identity— the road signs of Los Angeles, the old gates of Jeddah, the snowy streets of Sapporo—he shows us with warmth and fresh eyes the extraordinary places that billions of us call home.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
Pilot Mark Vanhoenacker’s gorgeously written memoir speaks to the world traveler in all of us. Growing up in a small town in Massachusetts, Vanhoenacker often dreamed of all the fantastical cities that existed somewhere beyond the horizon of his own tiny world. In his adult life as a commercial airline pilot, Vanhoenacker touches down in these distant places routinely, and the lush, sensual way he talks about them is a transportive experience. From a hazy Los Angeles sunrise to the heavy Kuwait City heat, Vanhoenacker’s richly textured descriptions help us really see each locale. Imagine a City is one of the most immersive travelogues we’ve read in a while—and one of the most intimate.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Gazing through the windshield of his 787, commercial airline pilot Vanhoenacker (Skyfaring) conjures the beauty of cities around the globe in this moving reflection on the meaning of home. After recalling his childhood in 1980s Pittsfield, Mass.—when his yearning to escape home for "skyscrapers, glittering lights, sweeping roads, a busy harbor, an airport (or three)" first took off—Vanhoenacker takes readers on a dazzling trip through hundreds of locales he's traversed in his past two decades as a pilot. Rome and Cairo, "cities of beginnings," prompt Vanhoenacker to muse on the power of origin myths, and the wolves that connect his New England home with the Eternal City. Other cityscapes, like those of Liverpool and Brasília, recall engineering diagrams of airplanes; while urban planner Lúcio Costa's intention in the late 1950s was to design Brasília's two axes like a cross, Vanhoenacker writes that Costa's blueprint's aeronautical allusions—particularly its name, Plano Piloto, which translates to Pilot Plan—have been a source of fascination among historians. Elsewhere, poetry beats at the heart of such cities as Delhi, London, Fargo, and Venice, while roiling rivers give Seoul and London, among others, their defining features. As he marvels at the locales he's visited, Vanhoenacker offers a taste of the high life that informs and awes in equal measure. Jet-setters will be enthralled.
