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| Dear American Airlines: A Novel | 
 enlarge | Author: Jonathan Miles
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Co
Category: Book
List Price: $22.00
Buy New: $8.69
You Save: $13.31 (61%)
New (40) Used (22) Collectible (8) from $8.69
Avg. Customer Rating:  33 reviews
Sales Rank: 3520
Media: Hardcover
Edition: 1
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 192
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.7
Dimensions (in): 8.3 x 5.6 x 0.8
ISBN: 0547054017
Dewey Decimal Number: 813.6
EAN: 9780547054018
ASIN: 0547054017
Publication Date: June 5, 2008
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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| Customer Reviews:
 Are You Serious??? August 17, 2008
2 out of 8 found this review helpful
Ok, can we say too many unnecessary cuss words? It is not even likable. You can't even get past the front page without being assaulted with a cuss word in every sentence. Can't he tell his story without all that garbage? The story lacks character and plot that flows and captures the reader. It is boring and filled with unnecessary ramblings.
 Best book I've read this year! August 14, 2008
0 out of 1 found this review helpful
Not since I've read Junot Diaz's "Oscar Wao" have I so enjoyed every minute of a book. So much story in this slim little volume! Bennie's story, his mother and father's, ex-wives, and Walenty, his character in the book he is translating, WoW! . Yes, it's dark, twisted, but hilarious with precisely drawn characters. I laughed and cried with poor Bennie. Like all of us, he is still trying to make sense of the world and his place in it at age 53. And despite the fact that he has been a party to life swirling him around its toilet bowl, he leaves us hopeful. Jonathan Miles is a brilliantly talented writer. I hope that he receives recognition for this fine novel. I am going to eagerly look to find everything else he has written and pray that we have more novels from him.
Eat Your Heart Out, James Frey August 14, 2008
2 out of 3 found this review helpful
Every writer who has been stranded in an airport is going to mutter "Why didn't I think of this?" when they pick up Jonathan Miles' epistolary first novel. Dear American Airlines is not a book about the perils of commercial flight (although they play a supporting role here). It's a novel about the perils of modern life. Especially the perils of modern life with alcohol.
The protagonist, Benjamin Ford, is stranded in Chicago's O'Hare as he begins, but much of the narrative, a rant told largely in flashbacks, is set in New Orleans where he grew up and got his girlfriend, Stella, pregnant with a daughter, also named Stella, or Speck, the nickname he gave her when her conception was discovered and abortion was considered. He hasn't seen either of them since the older Stella kicked him out and moved to California with the baby twenty-something years ago. Now, little Stella, whom he boozily promised he would walk down the aisle on her wedding day, is getting married to a woman named Syl, and Bennie is determined to be there.
I read Bennie's attempts to deal with unmanageable air traffic problems as a metaphor for his many years of struggling to manage alcohol without giving it up. But Bennie is sober now, down to his last vice of cigarettes, and we learn of his childhood with Miss Willa, his mother who now lives with her adult child, and his father, Henryk Gneich, a survivor of Dachau who died when Bennie was a teenager. From his father he got his love of poetry and the language of Poland, from which he makes his living. His mother, in many ways, has been a child both he and his father had to care for. But she loves Bennie, and she continues to show it as she writes brief messages to him on Post-its.
Miles covers much of the ground familiar to readers of memoir from James Frey and Augustin Burroughs, but he's far more disciplined. Part of the impact of this novel is that he manages to convey a lifetime of love and suffering into 180 pages. Miles writes about cocktails for the New York Times, but so tenderly does he write from Bennie's point of view that it's hard to believe he's not a recovering alcoholic. Either way, this is one impressive fiction debut.
 loooong story August 3, 2008
10 out of 16 found this review helpful
this story was long and boring to me, even when skimming through the polish translation pages, which didn't seem to lead anywhere, i was bored by the self-absorbed former addict. The words were there, but the feelings never reached me. Spurts of the past, interspersed with cigarette breaks...felt like having one myself. I kept trying because I had heard so many good reviews of it, but it never arrived for me.
 An impressive first novel, but not as good as the hype July 30, 2008
4 out of 7 found this review helpful
I heard interview after interview after interview with Jonathan Miles when this book came out. Based on what I heard, I was expecting a swift, fun satire. What I instead got was a kvetching slog. The main character, Bennie Ford, is a miscreant who I could never once find the remote bit likable.
The other problem was the entire style of this book: a long letter to AA. Maybe if you sit around reading Nicholas Baker you might think that this is a good way to tell a story. In Baker's hands, it is. In Miles' hands, it isn't. It's boring. Have your character do something. Anything.
Despite my complaints, Miles is clearly a gifted writer. But he is desperately in need of a better character.
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