What makes this captain of the heavens so appealing is a kind of all-American innocence that helps him savor 'the palmistry of lit streets' in Salt Lake City, seen from 38,000 feet above, as eagerly as he devours the poets of Delhi when touching down for 48 hours. Linking the places he flies between through snow, or gates, or the color blue, Vanhoenacker, meticulous enough to offer a 16-page bibliography, seems to have a near-bottomless appetite for fresh sights and guidebook curiosities ... In his first book, Skyfaring, Vanhoenacker gave us the simple rapture of watching the skies fill with color, as seen from a snug cabin that sometimes felt a bit like a jet-age Thoreau’s. In this new work, he plunges deeper into his own past growing up in Pittsfield as a gay man who perhaps always felt a little on the outside of things, seeing them from a different angle ... His autobiographical vignettes are searching and touching, delivered with an affectionate lyricism that brings home to us how his small town has become a kind of anchor in a mobile life and maybe even the place to which he’ll return when he retires. But for me the real distinctness of his work comes from the life he enjoys at cruising altitude ... There’ve been plenty of books about cabin attendants’ adventures as part of a globe-trotting sorority bringing the mile-high club down to earth; Imagine a City is a much more intimate and thoughtful work.
Mark Vanhoenacker has crafted an eloquent personal tribute to [cities] ... This is not a scholarly book on cities, yet Mr. Vanhoenacker does enjoy digging into the literature on the cities he loves ... His own observations, as well as his research on cities, are always highly particular ... While Imagine a City never reflects on the loneliness of the life of commercial pilots, that theme does come across between the lines ... He writes as someone who, from a very early age—looking at a metal globe—wanted to explore the world, to get to know it all, to touch it, so to speak, everywhere. I share that urge. Many of us still do. And for those of us who do, Imagine a City will hold us in a warm, welcome embrace.
Imagine a City is, to be sure, a travelogue ... It also is a primer on piloting a massive aircraft ... It is, too, an examination of the obverse side of getting the urge for going; sometimes it is the urge for going home, even if you can never go home again. It is, in addition, a coming-of age memoir ... Vanhoenacker offers a lyrical look at what life is like behind those bolted cabin doors ... Who knew that in command of one of humankind’s most remarkable modes of transport was a historian of humankind’s ancient history? Which of course is the charm of this book ... At the keyboard, Vanhoenacker has danced, and on his pages there is tumbling mirth indeed.
[Vanhoenacker's] intricately structured text offers several episodes that present us with memorable images of the world as experienced from the cockpit ... Vanhoenacker is exceptionally well travelled, and an exceptionally curious and widely read observer ... With a lesser writer, the result might have been miscellaneous and superficial, but the connections Vanhoenacker makes are not trivial. His visits may be of limited duration, but he doesn’t waste an hour, and with every return his engagement with each city deepens. A superb section on Delhi demonstrates his range ... The Malacca episode exemplifies Vanhoenacker’s excursiveness, as he swoops from city to city, enriching his material with each landing ... Almost every locale is a source of delight. The less entrancing aspects of the real do not often intrude ... this is an autobiography as much as a travelogue. And the foundation of his self-examination is his home city, Pittsfield, Massachusetts. It’s a lens through which he sees the world, and to which his writing returns again and again – perhaps a little too often. Sometimes the voltage drops when he takes us back to Massachusetts. The image of home stands behind the immense imaginary city that is an amalgamation of all the cities he has seen, but not even a writer of Vanhoenacker’s skill can elevate Pittsfield, in the minds of his readers, to the order of his Tokyo, or Uppsala, or Jeddah.
Imagine a City is a memoir wrapped within a scholarly travel book, at its heart a moving account of personal unbelonging. Vanhoenacker’s home city was Pittsfield, situated so high in Massachusetts that the local ski slope produced Olympic champions...He’s opaque about the trauma of his parents’ divorce when he was 16, but it was obviously profound...Biographical stuff is woven within meditative themes about the destinations he has explored so often — cities of air, snow, poetry, signs, gates, rivers, the colour blue; and every city bears a story, threads of memory, friendship or adventure...Imagine a City is rich with random facts...Geeky fans will be glad to know that he’s still flying — during lockdown Vanhoenacker flew cargo in 747s, then retrained on the 787 — but this book is not Skyfaring 2...There’s the occasional snapshot from the cockpit, but Imagine a City is not about aviation; it’s something more dreamy and erudite, a slightly reticent personal journey in which I’d have preferred more memoir, less city detail...He remains, however, a most likeable, warm-hearted narrator with an original world view.
Like jet travel itself, the tour is sometimes disorienting. You go to bed reading a chapter about Jeddah and wake up to find yourself in Delhi. But Vanhoenacker is a sure-handed navigator, filling in the gaps with history, poetry, and lots of local color ... While he might lack the kind of insider's knowledge that comes from spending a lifetime in a city, Vanhoenacker has the benefit of making short but frequent visits to lots of places, with a pocketful of foreign currencies and a backpack brimming with curiosity.
What makes Mark Vanhoenacker’s Imagine a City such a joy, then, is that this is a travel book entirely rooted in modernity and globalization, and thus unbothered by belatedness, but which nonetheless retains the wide-eyed wonder, not so much of a 19th-century explorer as of a medieval pilgrim ... Eschewing linearity for a mosaic form well matched to the discombobulating experience of frequent international air travel, the book arranges its cities into eleven thematic chapters ... Amongst all this there are the snippets of history and cultural information that readers might expect of a travel book, and a good scattering of satisfying factoids ... Vanhoenacker has a fine knack for identifying and naming city-related phenomena ... The individual sections of the chapters provide brief but atmospheric immersions ... The abrupt lurches from place to place can, at times, produce a degree of 'place lag' for the reader too. This is, surely, the point, though it is generally the more extended meditations on a particular city that are most satisfying ... As much as an account of ceaseless globetrotting, this book is a memoir of a life ultimately rooted in a single place and the way the relationship with that place is both maintained and transformed across a lifetime ... a blissfully un-belated travel book in which form, theme and sensibility are perfectly matched to the realities of modern travel. But it also manages to recapture the old romance of journeying itself, particularly in the sections emphasizing a pilot’s-eye view of the world ... Coming to the end of this book, even the most jaded frequent flyer may find themselves booking a window seat for their next journey, and making plans to get out of the hotel on their next layover.
The text is often erudite and poetic. Beautiful imagery and historical facts abound in chapters loosely organized around themes like air and prospects. Vanhoenacker’s initial impressions of cities—particularly during descent—are what makes this lengthy book most appealing. There are buried treasures, such as the discussion of the ocean’s many shades of blue, best seen from an airplane. The author’s exploration of his ongoing struggle with coming out lends some tenderness to the sometimes-lofty musings. But there is also a sense of disconnection as Vanhoenacker jogs and drinks coffee alone during his 48-hour layovers ... Readers learn bits and pieces about Vanhoenacker’s childhood, career path, and significant relationships, but overall the book lacks a strong personal narrative, which is disappointing. Extended descriptions of the author’s hometown of Pittsfield, MA, might challenge the patience of a U.S. reader expecting to read about more distant locales. Not recommended.
As a young boy surrounded by model planes, Vanhoenacker fell under the spell not only of aviation, but also of far-off destinations...Vanhoenacker began piloting long-haul jets all around the world, and he takes readers to Kuala Lumpur, Cape Town, Brasília, Jeddah, Sapporo, and numerous other places that may be exotic or familiar but that he views through a singular lens...Vanhoenacker is a collector of sumptuous details such as the 'imperfect radii or broken spokes' of London’s layout and the difficulties he faced learning Japanese...Philosophically rich without being ponderous, belonging on the same shelf as books by Saint-Exupéry, Markham, and Langewiesche, Vanhoenacker’s book is unfailingly interesting, full of empathetic details on faraway places and lives. It’s an absolute pleasure for any world citizen and a trove for any traveler...A sparkling addition to the literature of flight.
Gazing through the windshield of his 787, commercial airline pilot Vanhoenacker conjures the beauty of cities around the globe in this moving reflection on the meaning of home...After recalling his childhood in 1980s Pittsfield, Mass.—when his yearning to escape home for 'skyscrapers, glittering lights, sweeping roads, a busy harbor, an airport (or three)' first took off—Vanhoenacker takes readers on a dazzling trip through hundreds of locales he’s traversed in his past two decades as a pilot...As he marvels at the locales he’s visited, Vanhoenacker offers a taste of the high life that informs and awes in equal measure. Jet-setters will be enthralled.
