kwlf wrote:
the list.
What list is that?
Google says its a list of books banned from highshools in the US by somebody controversially being controversial…because they are controversial.
I think that’s doing them a disservice: people who go to the trouble of getting books banned, do so because they think its the right thing to do.
Occasionally, perhaps it is. I wouldn’t want to find ‘Ten painless ways to kill yourself, or others’ in the teenage section of my local library.
I wouldn’t want to find ‘Ten painless ways to kill yourself, or others’ in the teenage section of my local library.
Probably the safest place for it what with teenage library usage figures… 
I skim-read the list and some titles are very descriptive but others are vague or innocent sounding. Only two I’d actually heard of. An article also from the Texas Tribune shows some of the reasoning:
Of these titles, 41% address LGBTQ themes or have protagonists or prominent secondary characters who are LGBTQ. Another 40% of these books contains protagonists or prominent secondary characters of color.
critical race theory […] examines how racism is embedded in the country’s legal and structural systems
PEN America’s analysis also found that these bans have been largely driven by organized groups formed over the last year to combat “pornographic” and “CRT” materials in school.
“The work of groups organizing and advocating to ban books in schools is especially harmful to students from historically marginalized backgrounds, who are forced to experience stories that validate their lives vanishing from classrooms and library shelves,” Friedman said.
I‘m reading ‘The Killing Zone’ at the moment and apart from the already mentioned point about the quality of the statistics I found some of the recommendations questionable. For example in the chapter on ‘Runway Incursion’ the author recommends the phrase: “Tower 1234A is ready for takeoff”.
Shouldn’t that be “Ready for departure”? I thought that “takeoff” mustn’t be used except in a clearance. This has been the case since the Tenerife accident in 1977, which is mentioned just a couple of pages earlier.
Still it is an interesting book to read, but I couldn’t help but feel a little disappointed because of these inaccuracies.
Just finished self-published The Biplane in the Garden by Richard Vary, a homebuilding novice who built a show-winning Nieuport Bébé replica in his garage. The chapters alternate between the build, and learning to fly microlights then display flying with the Tiger Club. I found it engaging and wry, and was left disappointed that it had finished. Condensed version with photos on the UK Flyer website .
Full Throttle by John Deakin was another recent read, good, but not worth spending money as it largely duplicates the entertainment (rather than informative) articles in the AvWeb Pelican’s Perch archive.
Another one I remember from a few years ago was Night Over Water by Ken Follett, about a transatlantic PanAm Clipper flying boat; one of the characters has a Tiger Moth. The story was ok, and I seem to recall thinking details like navigation and fuel planning were well researched. The Pillars of the Earth is much better 
St Ex, Un Prince dans sa Citadelle by Bernard Chabbert and Romain Hugault
An aviation-centric biography of Antoine de Saint Exupéry; both author and illustrator are GA pilots. The text is poetic and moving, the illustrations accurate down to the rivet and the oil stain. Available only in French but highly recommended.
Not grounded as such anymore
Nearly finished Concorde by Mike Bannister
Superbly written. Written by someone closer to the topic than just about anybody, and covers a lot of the issues which have been so controversial over the years.
Fascinating stuff on the investigation of the French Concorde crash, and vanishing evidence and all that stuff.
Reading this one, which was recommended to me by my wife’s cousin, who is a Mirage 2000 pilot.
https://www.amazon.fr/Guerre-Vue-du-Ciel/dp/2915243565/
Good read so far, for those reasonably comfortable in French.
