William Langewiesche's life has been deeply intertwined with the idea and act of flying.  Fifty years ago his father, a test pilot, wrote Stick and Rudder, a text still considered by many to be the bible of aerial navigation.  Langewiesche himself learned to fly while still a child.  Now he shares his pilot's-eye view of flight with those of us who take flight for granted--exploring the inner world of a sky that remains as exotic and revealing as the most foreign destination. Langewiesche tells us how flight happens--what the pilot sees, thinks, and feels.  His description is not merely about speed and conquest.  It takes the form of a deliberate climb, leading at low altitude first over a new view of a home, and then higher, into the solitude of the cockpit, through violent storms and ocean nights, and on to unexpected places in the mind. In Langewiesche's hands it becomes clear, at the close of this first century of flight, how profoundly our vision has been altered by our liberation from the ground.  And we understand how, when we look around, we may find ourselves reflected in the grace and turbulence of a human sky. William Langewiesche seems drawn to those vast, open landscapes that challenge both body and soul. In Sahara Unveiled , he traversed the length of that inhospitable desert from Algiers to Timbuktu, along the way limning an intimate portrait of the environment and the people who inhabit it. In Inside the Sky Langewiesche meditates on a different wilderness as he explores the ramifications of flight. "Mechanical wings allow us to fly," he writes, "but it is with our minds that we make the sky ours." And it is chiefly flight's workings on our perceptions and our imagination that interests Langewiesche. "Flying at its best is a way of thinking.... It lets us see ourselves in context, as creatures struggling through life on the face of a planet, not separate from nature, but its most expressive agents. It lets us see that our struggles form patterns on the land, that these patterns repeat to an extent which before we had not known, and that there is a sense to them." Flying has, in fact, changed humankind's perception of itself. Discussing the borderlands along the Rio Grande, Langewiesche points out that from the air it is impossible to disregard the great differences in wealth and environment between Mexico and the United States: "The narrowness of the view is a problem particular to the ground. Few tourists ever went to Presidio, but those who did often got the astonishing impression that the border there hardly existed. Residents, too, because they freely forded the river, could share that illusion. But from the air the view always widens.... What the ordinary aerial view really shows is exactly the opposite of a unified world." Langewiesche writes eloquently and at length about flight's influence on politics, environmentalism, culture, and human psychology, punctuating these musings with fascinating accounts of real people--everyone from Otto Lilienthal, a 19th-century German engineer who died while testing a hang glider, to Walton Little, a computer engineer and private pilot who happened to be an eyewitness to the 1996 Valujet air disaster. Bad weather, crowded airports, plane crashes, and the physics of flying all form part of the tapestry as Langewiesche weaves history, science, philosophy, and his own experiences as a pilot into this tough, tender paean to the miracle of flight. --Alix Wilber Unlike other authors who write about flight and flying, Langewiesche (Sahara Unveiled, LJ 8/96) covers a wide range of topics. He details his interesting philosophy of flying as he talks about the view from above from the various aircraft both large and small that he has flown. He gives a readable physics lesson on how airplanes turn and portrays the political side of flying as he takes a pilot's look at the organizational friction between the FAA and the air traffic controllers. He saves his best writing for a chapter on "storm flying," where pilot and crew draw upon their piloting skills and reserve of calmness under pressure to fly a small aircraft above, below, or through storms safely. His love of flying comes through in this chapter. Recommended for medium and large public libraries or for those who request a window seat on their next flight, long or short.?David Schau, Kanawha Cty. P.L., Charleston, WV Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc. Atlantic Monthly foreign correspondent Langewiesche (Cutting for Sign, 1993; Sahara Unveiled, 1996), himself an experienced pilot, explores the pleasures and challenges of flight in seven essays that are alternately philosophical, personal, and journalistic. Flight's greatest gift, Langewiesche says, is to let us look around. The book itself takes a while to get off the ground but begins to soar with The Turn, in which Langewiesche vividly explores the aerodynamics of keeping aloft in layman's terms, tracing as well the evolution of in