In Bonifacio's Bolo, Ambeth Ocampo adds even more interesting bits to another scrapbook of history.

    

    His love for these authors is the touchstone of Written Lives. Collected here are twenty pieces recounting great writers' lives, "or, more precisely, snippets of writers' lives." Thomas Mann, Rilke, Arthur Conan Doyle, Turgenev, Djuna Barnes, Emily Brontë, Malcolm Lowry, and Kipling appear ("all fairly disastrous individuals"), and "almost nothing" in his stories is invented.Like Isak Dinesen (who "claimed to have poor sight, yet could spot a four-leaf clover in a field from a remarkable distance away"), Marías has a sharp eye. Nabokov is here, making "the highly improbable assertion that he is 'as American as April in Arizona,'" as is Oscar Wilde, who, in debt on his deathbed, ordered up champagne, "remarking cheerfully, 'I am dying beyond my means.'" Faulkner, we find, when fired from his post office job, explained that he was not prepared "to be beholden to any son-of-a-bitch who had two cents to buy a stamp." Affection glows in the pages of Written Lives, evidence, as Marías remarks, that "although I have enjoyed writing all my books, this was the one with which I had the most fun."

    As the voyage steams (sweats, rather) eastward from Seattle to New York, he meets a diverse, humorous, and motley bunch of individuals in full support of his spirit of adventure, evidence that one's wildest dreams are in fact worth pursuing. The story is a testament to the power of welcoming the stranger and the good that resides in us all. Read it to laugh, read it to learn, or read it simply to remember that you are human.They say once you start pedaling you can't stop. So buckle your helmet, don spandex if you dare, and get ready for the ride of a lifetime.

    Though competing against one another for the flying assignments of their dreams, like the fearsome F-15 and F-16 fighters, a good mission sometimes takes a backseat to a good party or punch line in this classroom of cut-ups. The high stakes, however, loom over Lt. Wright. In a program where one out of three students fails, not everybody who starts UPT will finish it. And not everybody who does finish will get a desirable flying assignment. Some won’t even escape the Columbus Air Force Base. Will Lt. Wright get his dream assignment flying a C-141 cargo plane based out of beachside Charleston, South Carolina? Or be forced to perpetuate the If you ain’t a pilot… system as the dreaded FAIP (First Assignment Instructor Pilot) in Columbus, Mississippi? Though a military memoir, IF YOU AIN’T A PILOT… is a story of youthful innocence, a happy tale of the best of friends. Beneath the story’s surface layer of how an Air Force officer’s aeronautical rating determines his worth, similar thematic layers unfold around gender, race, and other ways people define each other. At its core, this story is about people, our relationships, and how we choose to treat each other. While 30 years have passed since the memoir’s events—and our aircraft, our enemy, and our pop-culture ties have changed—we still struggle with our differences. IF YOU AIN’T A PILOT taps into the mystic of Top Gun, the satirical wryness of Candide and Catch-22, and the allure of the air-travel genre captured by Mark Vanhoenacker’s recent Skyfaring: A Journey with a Pilot (2015), Tom Wolfe’s The Right Stuff, and James Salter’s The Hunters. Set at the end of the Cold War in the heart of Dixie, IF YOU AIN’T A PILOT…crosses Top Gun adrenaline with Pee-Wee’s Playhouse antics at a flight training base where Air Force idealism collides with Deep South heritage. Complete at 142,000 words, this comedic memoir written for a general audience charts the year when a newly commissioned officer is challenged not only by flight school but also by the Air Force dictum If you ain’t a pilot, you ain’t $#!+. That said, the primary mission for IF YOU AIN’T A PILOT...is to make readers laugh. While the story is written for a non-military audience, military pilots, civilian pilots, and any person who ever dreamed about flying as a kid will love IF YOU AIN’T A PILOT….

    Remember! is an autobiography which recounts Marcel Scharfstein's life experience in the Warsaw Ghetto and in Nazi concentration camps of Poland and Germany during World War II.