W. Scott Olsen's Books

At Speed

Traveling the Long Road Between Two Points

By: W. Scott Olsen

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At Speed

Traveling the Long Road Between Two Points

By: W. Scott Olsen

The intricacies and diversity of America, including its small towns, people, landscapes, roads, and history, are explored in this collection of travel essays that recount the author's odyssey along the roads through the heartland of America.

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Page Count

198

Publisher

U of Nebraska Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

080323581X

ISBN 13

9780803235816

Never Land

Adventures, Wonder, and One World Record in a Very Small Plane

By: W. Scott Olsen

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Never Land

Adventures, Wonder, and One World Record in a Very Small Plane

By: W. Scott Olsen

According to W. Scott Olsen, there are two reasons for flying. The first is just to get somewhere. The second has nothing to do with destination. It is this second reason, expressing our deepest curiosity and our longings for infinity, grace, and clarity, that Never Land explores. At once frankly philosophical and engagingly practical, the book combines accounts of touring in the air, the history of flight, the sensations of flying, and the technical acts and facts of navigating, piloting, lifting off, and landing.

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Page Count

202

Publisher

U of Nebraska Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0803230044

ISBN 13

9780803230040

Hard Air

Adventures from the Edge of Flying

By: W. Scott Olsen

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Hard Air

Adventures from the Edge of Flying

By: W. Scott Olsen

Hard Air℗¡a book about extraordinary flying?flying under conditions that keep fighters on the carrier deck and rockets on the launch pad?a book about rescue missions and long, lonely flights to gather urgently needed information, about flights to places where no one should be flying: into hurricanes, firestorms, and deep, engine-killing cold. As a pilot himself, W. Scott Olsen brings to these tales a sense of wonder and adventure as well as a genuine, firsthand understanding of the dangers and rigors of such flying.

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Page Count

246

Publisher

U of Nebraska Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0803217366

ISBN 13

9780803217362

Prairie Sky

A Pilot's Reflections on Flying and the Grace of Altitude

By: W. Scott Olsen

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Prairie Sky

A Pilot's Reflections on Flying and the Grace of Altitude

By: W. Scott Olsen

“It’s almost like ballet. Preflight. Starting. Warm-up. The voices from the control tower—the instructions. Taxiing. The rush down the runway. Airborne. There are names for every move. The run-up. Position and hold. Every move needs to be learned, practiced, made so familiar you feel the patterns in every other thing you do. It’s technical, yes. But there is a grace to getting metal and bone into the sky.” Prairie Sky is a celebration of curiosity and a book for explorers. In this collection of contemplative essays, Scott Olsen invites readers to view the world from a pilot’s seat, demonstrating how, with just a little bit of altitude, the world changes, new relationships become visible, and new questions seem to rise up from the ground. Whether searching for the still-evident shores of ancient lakes, the dustbowl-era shelterbelt supposed to run the length of the country, or the even more elusive understandings of physics and theology, Olsen shares the unique perspective and insight allowed to pilots. Prairie Sky explores the reality as well as the metaphor of flight: notions of ceaseless time and boundless space, personal interior and exterior vision, social history, meteorology, and geology. Olsen takes readers along as he chases a new way of looking at the physical world and wonders aloud about how the whole planet moves in interconnected ways not visible from the ground. While the northern prairie may call to mind images of golden harvests and summer twilight such images do not define the region. The land bears marks left by gut-shaking thunderstorms, hard-frozen rivers, sweeping floods, and hurricane-size storms. Olsen takes to the midwestern sky to confront the ordinary world and reveals the magic--the wondrous and unique sights visible from the pilot’s seat of a Cessna. Like Antoine de Saint-Exupery’s classic work Wind, Sand and Stars, Olsen’s Prairie Sky reveals the heart of what it means to fly. In the grand romantic tradition of the travel essay, it opens the dramatic paradoxes of self and collective, linear and circular, the heart and the border.

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Age

Page Count

168

Publisher

University of Missouri Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0826273041

ISBN 13

9780826273048

Book's by W. Scott Olsen

At Speed

At Speed

Never Land

Never Land

Hard Air

Hard Air

Prairie Sky

Prairie Sky

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