Reviews for Dear American Airlines

The average rating for Dear American Airlines based on 2 reviews is 3 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2008-12-11 00:00:00 Karen Admon There are exactly two faintly positive things I can say about this book, so let's get them out of the way. i. It was mercifully short. ii. It wasn't quite dreadful enough to go on the 'utter dreck' shelf, though its brevity may have been a key mitigating factor. Although it didn't quite make the 'utter dreck' cut, it was an overhyped, forgettable waste of time. One of those books where, when I read the glowing reviews it has garnered from others, I feel that maybe I live in a parallel universe. I mean, look at everything that the book has going against it: * it's a first person monolog by Bennie, a writer and translator * Bennie takes a look back at the mess he's made of his life * he's a failed poet * a failed alcoholic poet * who suffers from terminal omphaloskepsis (OK, no more airport jokes, I promise!) and logorrhea, a combination that bodes ill for the reader * Bennie has poor impulse control, which unfortunately leads to * way too many barroom brawl scenes, which are nowhere near as fascinating as the author appears to think; * introducing New Orleans as a backdrop to spice things up might have worked for John Kennedy Toole; here it smacks of sweaty desperation * Bennie done his woman wrong; calling her Stella and giving him a locked-outside-the-house-drunk-in-the-alley-scene goes well beyond sweaty desperation and crosses right over into bankrupt imagination territory * Bennie done wrong by his daughter too. And by his second wife. But I think we could have guessed that * padding out Bennie's tale of woe by including big chunks of the book he is translating (from Polish), giving a second narrative that unfolds in parallel, sounds like a real neat idea in theory * but all it did was muddle a story that already had way too many flashbacks even more The "trapped in O' Hare" aspect of the book is appropriate, however. Because the sensation I had the entire time reading it was the overwhelmingly claustrophobic feeling of being trapped next to a drunken, boorish loudmouth, intent on boring me with every last insignificant detail of everything that had ever happened to him in his insanely uninteresting, fucked-up cliche of a life. There must be something wrong with me that I actually finished it. (Bold type indicates a word, phrase, or cliche I've always wanted to use in a review)

Review # 2 was written on 2008-06-23 00:00:00 Zj Mamatas Entirely dysfunctional airline industry as a metaphor for entirely dysfunctional American life--abysmal failures to meet expectations and make connections, mounds of baggage nobody knows what to do with, and that sickening, existential feeling that life can be a vastly unfair, bureaucratic wasteland in which nobody cares. The writing is brilliant--fresh hysterical descriptions of being stuck forever in the hell hole that is O'Hare side by side with a surprisingly deep story of a human life gone badly awry. This is hilarious, pathetic, sad, cynical, hopeful--all of it. I was totally taken by it. Miles' humor sucked me into the story and left me overwhelmed, and then suddenly satisfied, at the end. I couldn't put it down. HIGHLY recommended!