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Imagine a City
- A Pilot's Journey Across the Urban World
- Narrated by: Kyle Soller
- Length: 12 hrs and 2 mins
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Imagine a City
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Publisher's Summary
This love letter to the cities of the world—from the airline pilot–author of Skyfaring—is "a journey around both the author's mind and the planet's great cities that leaves us energized, open to new experiences and ready to return more hopefully to our lives" (Alain de Botton, author of The Art of Travel).
In his small New England hometown, Mark Vanhoenacker spent his childhood dreaming of elsewhere—of the distant, real cities he found on the illuminated globe in his bedroom, and of one perfect metropolis that existed only in his imagination. These cities were the sources of endless comfort and escape, and of a lasting fascination. Streets unspooled, towers shone, and anonymous crowds bustled in the places where Mark hoped he could someday be anyone—perhaps even himself.
Now, as a commercial airline pilot, Mark has spent nearly two decades crossing the skies of our planet and touching down in dozens of the storied cities he imagined as a child. He experiences these destinations during brief stays that he repeats month after month and year after year, giving him an unconventional and uniquely vivid perspective on the places that form our urban world.
In this intimate yet expansive work that weaves travelogue with memoir, Mark celebrates the cities he has come to know and to love, through the lens of the hometown his heart has never quite left. As he explores emblematic facets of each city’s identity—the road signs of Los Angeles, the old gates of Jeddah, the snowy streets of Sapporo—he shows us with warmth and fresh eyes the extraordinary places that billions of us call home.
What the critics say
“Mark Vanhoenacker is a long-haul commercial pilot, and his 787 Dreamliner—a very apt name—takes him to all the cities he dreamed of as a boy in smalltown America (and many more). His perspective--from the cockpit, on the ground, and through the lens of retrospection—defies easy comparison: Imagine a coming-of-age memoir and shrewdly picaresque travelogue told by Jules Verne, E,B. White, and Jan Morris rolled into one. There is a moment we all know, head angled against an airplane window at night, when you can see both yourself and what's below. Imagine a City lays claim to that moment. Vanhoenacker's curiosity about the planet and his honesty about himself will leave a permanent mark.” —Cullen Murphy, editor at large of The Atlantic
"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 from a man who, seeing ‘the small metal plate on which an arrow indicates qibla, the direction of Mecca’ in [a] hotel room in Abu Dhabi, uses it ‘to estimate the initial direction of the great circle route’ that will take him and his big bird back to London as the light comes up again. . . . 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 . . . seems to have a near-bottomless appetite for fresh sights and guidebook curiosities.” —Pico Iyer, Air Mail
“A century ago, at the dawn of flight, people imagined that writers would want to become pilots, and vice versa, because of the revelations that come with seeing the Earth from above. Mark Vanhoenacker's elegant, engrossing book shows the power of these twinned perspectives, from the skies and up close at ground level. Readers who have not yet traveled with him at the controls of a 787 will be grateful to accompany him on the journeys in these pages.” —James Fallows, coauthor of Our Towns