Taking Off

by Eric Kraft

Book Overview

One day, middle-aged Manhattanite Peter Leroy receives an unsettling postcard from a childhood classmate. With his wife, Albertine, he returns to his hometown of Babbington, Long Island, and finds it... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0312318847
• ISBN13: 9780312318840
• Release Date: July 2006
• Publisher: St. Martin's Press
• Length: 205 Pages
• Weight: 0.85 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 6.0" x 8.5"

Customer Reviews

Forget Keillor and read Kraft

Eric Kraft and Garrison Keillor are both prominent satirists of the particular part of the United States where they grew up, Kraft covering the south shore of Long Island and Keillor covering Minnesota. As it happens, I grew up in both locations (well, in the case of Keillor, Wisconsin, but close enough). Why do I find Keillor unreadable and overrated and Kraft a hidden gem? There are several reasons: 1. Keillor's humor is repetitious. "Guy Noir, Private Eye" is cute and amusing the first time you hear it, but dull and humorless after the third or fourth time, not to mention the thirtieth or fortieth time. With Kraft, you never know what the next page will bring. He is the master of digressions, dragging in all sorts of asides, making his books a constant and rewarding surprise. 2. Keillor displays a contempt for the people he writes about. His tone encourages his readers to feel superior to the people of the rural Midwest. Kraft makes his people look silly at times, but the first person narrator always gets his share of the pratfalls, resulting in a more democratic and humane form of humor. 3. Keillor relies on the ironic. He really has nothing more to say than to beat a bunch of stale jokes to death and count on his readers to share in his attitude. Kraft can be enjoyed on many levels: the warm nostalgia of a memoir of the fifties, the satire inherent in spotting the limitations of such a memoir, the compromises writers make when they write history (particularly personal history), the limitations of memory . . . you can probe as deeply as you like or just enjoy the surface. As all great literature does, Kraft enters into a dialog with the reader, providing him or her with what he or she wants to take from the story. The result is that Keillor's northern Midwest bears no recognizable connection to reality while Kraft wakens memories I have forgotten for forty years. Oh, and Kraft is ten times funnier, too.

The imprecision of memory

For those of us who love the various episodes of The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences, & Observations of Peter Leroy, Taking Off is a classic. Peter's return to Babbington as an adult is skilfully woven with his memories of his childhood experience as the Birdboy of Babbington. Once again, we have the opportunity to look at the places where memory collides with reality, both in Peter's life and in our own. Reading this book, I wanted to search out back issues of "Impractical Craftsman," so I could marvel over such projects as Peter's floatplane.

Kraft is a comic genius.

No one writes novels like Eric Kraft - lighthearted, literate, easy-to-read, yet packed with meaningful observations about growing up and growing old. "Taking Off" continues where his first book, "Little Follies" began, as Peter Leroy reminisces about growing up 50 or so years ago in the town of Babbington, Long Island. The thing is that the grown-up Peter feels free to invent or embellish as he sees fit, letting us in on the joke as he does so. Sometimes the truth isn't all that interesting, Leroy/Kraft seems to be saying, so why stay shackled to it? This latest one is the first novel of a projected trilogy, with Peter trying to set the record straight about his teenage exploits as the Birdboy of Babbington. Evidently Peter did not actually fly that homemade plane all the way from New York to Mexico, as local legend has it. Evidently a lot of walking and taxiing was involved. I laughed a lot while reading this, feeling let down at the end only because we Kraft fans will have to wait (a year? two years?) to enjoy Peter's exploits after taking off from Babbington. BTW, "Taking Off" is not a "thriller," as another reviewer characterizes it: it's pure comedy.

well crafted character flying thriller

Peter Leroy is stunned to learn that Babbington, his Long Island hometown, is being turned into a theme park built around his famous teenage cross country flight from there to Corosso, New Mexico. Upset that the media will sniff out the truth of his flight at fifteen that was more grounded than aviary, Peter and his wife Albertine head to his hometown to prevent a travesty from occurring. Peter begins his quest, but the townsfolk seem swept away by euphoria; that is those not soaring on avaricious wings. He is stunned to see a replica of his aerocycle (see THE IMPRACTICAL CRAFTSMAN), but as he tries to insure the truth comes out without destroying his name, Peter decides to reenact the flight, but this time do it right by mostly if not totally remaining in the air. The only problem is that the enemy apparently has flows the coop with Albertine as their prisoner, guest or hostage. TAKING OFF is a terrific clever sequel that can stand alone very nicely, but is incredibly enhanced by reading the flight at fifteen as chronicled in THE IMPRACTICAL CRAFTSMAN. The story line grips the audience from the moment an astonished Peter finds out that his town is honoring his solo flight and never slows down as the hero faces adversaries and himself. This is a well crafted character flying thriller. Harriet Klausner