Captain Robert N. Buck retired from TWA after having flown well over two thousand Atlantic crossings and thirty-seven years of service as chief pilot and director of thunderstorm research. During World War II he was engaged in weather research for the U.S. Air Corps, for which he was awarded, as a civilian, the Air Medal by President Harry Truman. More recently, Buck has worked with the International Civil Aviation Organization -- the UN's body for aviation -- to develop a new plan of world airspace.
In North Star over My Shoulder, Bob Buck tells of a life spent up and over the clouds, and of the wonderful places and marvelous people who have been a part of that life. He captures the feel, taste, and smell of flying's great early era -- how the people lived, what they did and felt, and what it was really like to be a part of the world as it grew smaller and smaller. A terrific storyteller and a fascinating man, Bob Buck has turned his well-lived life into a delightful memoir for anyone who remembers when there really was something special in the air. ( )

Buck has lead a fascinating life in the air, and on that merit alone I give this book the three stars. The amount of aviation history of you learn about by reading his story is amazing.

Unfortunately the content only barely sustains the horrid writing. It suffers from the same bland and cliched writing that anyone who regularly reads aviation magazines is all too familiar with. I'm talking about things like not understanding which details are relevant to a story and which aren't, so the author just throws them all in because, I assume the logic goes, those propellerheads will eat up anything even tangentially related to flying. He also follows the same secret formula that indicates exactly how many adjectives and adverbs need to be in a sentence to convey the appropriate emotion (no doubt with thesaurus at the ready to provide all those fancy words). Unfortunately the effect is, as always, the exact opposite: all sense of emotion is drained by the awkwardly composed prose and forced feel to the writing voice.

If you can make yourself wade through the horrible style, you'll be rewarded with potentially magical stories like what it was like to navigate the old airliners by the stars, but you'll have to provide the magical aspect yourself because Buck tells it like it wasn't...drawn out and boring. ( )

A real gem of a book. Bob Buck started flying as a young man in the 1920s and soon became well known due to some record making flights, including breaking the junior transcontinental record and for a time was the youngest licensed pilot in the United States. At the age of 30 he joined TWA, became chief pilot in 1945 and flew until the mandatory retirement age of 60 in 1974. During that time he flew special missions for the Air Force, became friends with politicians and actors (there's a marvelous photo of him and Bob Hope on a movie set) and was a personal favorite of Howard Hughes. He started with TWA on DC-2s and ended up piloting the first 747 for them. It's a well written, easy to read story. Recommended for not only aviation enthusiasts but also for the general reader. ( )