What do things look like from the cockpit of a 747? Mark Van Haniker will join us to

talk about his new book Sky Faring, a journey with a pilot.

The book is in a sense what I would show you during flight. It's what I would tell you

about if you could come up all your over Siberia or over Greenland.

What happened when a Virginia school district shut down its schools to prevent desegregation?

Kristen Green will be here to talk about her new book, something must be done about Prince Edward County.

There are kids who travel across the county lines every day to go to another school or live with grandparents during the week.

And there are kids who went to work in the fields with their parents, you know, often picking tobacco and never return to school.

Alexander Alter will let us know what's going on in the publishing world. Greg Coles has bestseller news.

And we'll let readers and listeners ask a few questions for us editors here at the Book Review.

This is Inside the New York Times Book Review. I'm Pamela Paul.

Mark Van Haniker joins us now. He is the author of Sky Faring, a journey with a pilot. Hi Mark.

Hi, I'm happy to be here. A journey with a pilot. You're the pilot, presumably, in the subtitle.

But it's interesting that you did it in that third person.

I kind of wanted to, I didn't necessarily want to be so much about me initially.

I wanted to really write about the experience of flying in a very general sense and to compare what you see from the flight deck with what you can see as a passenger.

And then as I went along, I was encouraged to put more and more of my personal story into it and how I got into flying.

And so I added those details in and so the title perhaps reflects those attentions.

You do have an interesting path to becoming a pilot. This is not the first thing that you did out of school. How did you become a pilot?

Well, I grew up in a pretty small town in western Massachusetts and I was obsessed with airplanes.

I had model airplanes hanging from my ceiling. I was always asking my parents to take me to air shows.

But we didn't know any pilots and there wasn't a big airport nearby.

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