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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: 3489
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:
 Too much whining July 24, 2008
7 out of 15 found this review helpful
I only read 70 pages, but found it difficult to read - kept waiting for something to happen other than the author whining about his life and the predicament in which he finds himself because his flight was canceled. Didn't really get the whole Polish story intertwined. Without dialog, it's too much repetititive prose. Witty in parts, but not enough to sustain me to the end of the short novel.
 Not David Sedaris, as was suggested to me July 23, 2008
5 out of 8 found this review helpful
Like so many other reviewers, this is not the book that I was expecting to read. I picked this book up because it was recommended to me because I enjoy David Sedaris. This book is not comparable to a Sedaris book, although in my opinion, it is not better or worse, just different. I did find myself struggling to appreciate the book as it was and abandoning my preconceived notions of what the book would be. I am glad that I was able to set my expectations aside and enjoy this book for the story it had to provide me.
I began reading the book at O'Hare and continued reading it on an American Airlines flight. Although it was nice to explore the setting, which is accurately described, the location did not allow me to get as much from the book as I feel I could have. The translations, in particular, were difficult to read and I am sure that they contain more information on Bennie than I was capable of recognizing.
Dear American Airlines is a wonderful, sad, and moving story. I am glad that I was able to move past what I thought the book would be and enjoy this read.
A poignant and entertaining tale of losing it all and finding oneself July 11, 2008
4 out of 5 found this review helpful
This summer you may find yourself at the mercy of the airline industry, paying high prices and risking canceled flights. Or you may opt for train or car travel and long for a good book to absorb yourself in as the landscape rolls by the windows. Even if you plan to stay at home this vacation season, DEAR AMERICAN AIRLINES, Jonathan Miles's debut novel, will satisfy your desire for a slim and funny but also quite thoughtful read.
Bennie Ford, an aging alcoholic poet who makes his living translating Polish literature into English, is angry. His daughter is getting married, and he is stuck at O'Hare Airport. Between bouts of working on his latest translation, a depressing post-war tale by his friend Alojzy, he writes a letter to American Airlines, meaning to express his displeasure at being stranded by the canceled flight. The letter becomes, however, both a screed and lament. He rails against the injustices he suffered while wallowing in guilt over his mostly wasted life. His letter is full of righteous indignation and regret but is very witty as well.
Raised by an eccentric couple, a beautiful schizophrenic and a quiet Polish immigrant who survived a German concentration camp, Bennie grows up with romantic notions but allows them to be drowned in alcohol. His relationship with Stella is passionate, brief and doomed, leaving him a heartbroken young father. His daughter, also named Stella but whom he calls Speck, grows up without him. But a wedding invitation stirs up decades of feelings and memories, and, stuck in the airport, he has plenty of time to write it all down.
From his humid and eccentric New Orleans childhood, to a carefree and artistic year in Poland, from his failings as a partner and father to his middle age spent with his ailing mother, Bennie's letter is his confession and autobiography. The sights and sounds of the airport distract him from his tale (but add much-needed comic relief for readers), and his work on Alojzy's book, excerpted throughout, provide a story within a story challenging us to find (not always apparent) parallels between Bennie and the main character.
Like a comedic Charles Bukowski, Bennie knows he is his own worst enemy. He has been traumatized by life mostly because of his own horrible choices. As a translator he finds philosophic and poetic justice: taking the ideas, the work, even the successes of others and putting his own creative, if mostly invisible and unacknowledged, energy into them. With this letter he puts it all on the line: his boozy mistakes, his selfish love, his hope, his belief in transformation and change, and what poetry is left in him. This letter is Bennie Ford's masterpiece, but his dream is to make it to his daughter's wedding.
In DEAR AMERICAN AIRLINES, Bennie starts out angry and frustrated, but by the end of the book, and letter, he is feeling much better and hopeful for a second chance. Miles's first novel is a quick and wild read full of great American themes like redemption, heartbreak, struggle and movement. He has succeeded in writing a very readable book with a unique format. Bennie's tale is at once familiar and surprising, and this summer readers will want to be trapped with Bennie in the airport as he shares his poignant and entertaining tale of losing it all and finding oneself.
--- Reviewed by Sarah Rachel Egelman
 RICK "SHAQ" GOLDSTEIN SAYS: "WE KNOW YOU HAD A CHOICE OF AIRLINES..."BUH-BUY"!" July 5, 2008
48 out of 58 found this review helpful
The first thing prospective readers should know, is that even though the story places the protagonist/author Benjamin "Benny" Ford in O'Hare Airport, eighty-percent of the story has nothing to do with the agonies of a delayed flight. As a constant nationwide traveler myself, when I heard about this book, I immediately imagined unlimited humorous plots and sub-plots all at the expense of the un-caring Airline industry and its echoing tentacles that encompass security, parking, bathrooms, etc. I envisioned myself (and other travelers like me) laughing, yelling, and pointing accusatory fingers at the hapless and sadistic airline characters portrayed in the book as I shrieked: "I told you I wasn't the only one who asked for a pillow"... "I wasn't the only one who wondered why the airlines wouldn't tell you where your connecting gates were located as the plane is pulling into a gate"... "or betting the passenger seated next to me that the attendant they promised would be waiting at the gate to help you with connections wouldn't be there..." etc. As I said, maybe twenty-per-cent of the story relates to the actual flight and airport.
But what the author does do, very intelligently and cleverly, is use the excuse of a delayed flight to start writing a letter to American Airlines to ask for his $392.68 to be refunded, since during the delay he figured he would not be able to get to Los Angeles in time for his daughter's wedding. His flight which started in New York and was supposed to have a forty-five minute layover in Chicago, instead was forced to land in Peoria and taken by bus to O'Hare Airport where the delay lasted for indeterminable hours through the night. The letter starts off "requesting" a refund, but quickly changes to "demanding" a refund. And from there is where the author (through the letter) proceeds to tell his entire sordid life story, despite being stuck in an airport, which he returns the reader to not frequently enough. Benny is a recovering alcoholic, failed poet, whose drinking ended his first marriage, which had produced the child whose wedding he is attempting to go to in Los Angeles, despite the fact that until he received the announcement, he hadn't seen or talked to his daughter since she was an infant and her mother grabbed her and fled in an attempt to escape the alcoholic destruction that Benny called a life. Along with the date and location of the wedding, Benny also was informed that his estranged daughter was marrying a woman.
If you have ever met a person at a bar or at a party, who is not only drunk, but "amped-up" on cocaine or any type of speed, and by simply saying hello, you have activated a non-stop-high-speed, at times extremely interesting and somewhat amusing, story of their life... but every decade or so of his story... he veers off the road... or takes the wrong off ramp... or finds (to him) interesting tangents that may involve a blemish on the wall... well... if you have... then the author's writing style will seem familiar to you. Don't get me wrong, there are some lyrically beautiful and cleverly written passages such as the first time he talks on the phone to his adult daughter: "WE LAUGHED TOGETHER AT THAT ONE, WHICH FELT GOOD - A SQUIRT OF OIL IN THE DECAYED AND RUSTED JOINTS OF OUR BOND." Or after he received the invitation in the mail which was the first connection between Father and daughter since infancy: "...AS IF I'D FOUND THE PALE CRUMB OF A TRAIL LEADING BACK TO MY LIFE. "Or after the first phone call between them had ended he summarized to himself: "AT TIMES OUR CONVERSATION WAS SO LIGHT AND EASY THAT IT DISTURBED ME; WITH THAT MUCH WATER UNDER THE BRIDGE, IT, WAS HARD TO BELIEVE THE BRIDGE COULD STILL BE STANDING." What derails the adrenaline fueled poetry is the author periodically (actually a little more than periodic) changing gears completely by leaving the currently discussed time and place crisis in his life story, and then he starts TRANSLATING A POLISH BOOK about Walenty Mozelewski and his war injury induced wooden leg.
This is obviously a very talented writer, but I feel wholeheartedly that this book could have been much better. He had a "sitting-duck" in the airline industry that he could have pulverized, but he barely touched them, and when the reader's emotions were vulnerable and in the palm of his hand, he would abruptly switch to Polish translation regarding Walenty and his wooden leg.
 Just exceptional July 4, 2008
1 out of 3 found this review helpful
Written apparently by a specialist in reviews of New York City cocktails, "Dear American Airlines" is a book that recalls A.J. Liebling's comment that "wine drinking is more subjective than horse racing and nearly as subjective as love". This is a phenomenal book I say, knowing that the combinations of New Orleans, New York, mid-50's life age-wise, and a long airport layover could make me a target audience, the perfect foil of some focus group. Whatever, no money on the table.
This presumably fictional self absorbed rant is something that can just consume a like minded reader. It gets on a resentful tear that evolves into some sort of minor epiphany, life sparing at least. The story, to the extent that there is one, is rolled out on page 18 as in "how pleasant to think of the past as something curable, as a benign rather than a malignant cancer. Almost a pleasant concept in a world in which tickets costing $392.68 earned your passage to your destination on the date printed on the ticket. But just as goddam unlikely".
This same book has the observation that "my native New Orleans, where dialing a number found on a bathroom wall yielded you a discussion about po'boys, was truly a weird city". Well that's true, and god bless New Orleans. And the comment that is the m.o. of my 90 year old father but he doesn't admit that "true stories are about food and made up stories are about love", but don't tell him I said that. Or on the day to day, "resolve right, the hayseed cousin of ambition, doan wanna change the world, just wanna get the crop in". This all makes sense to this Amazon reviewer. When reading that "At this juncture, fighting the familiar old temptations...would be like swatting away a wasp while being chewed by an alligator. What's the point" it's just thoughts put into words that do more than amuse, although that they do.
If this review makes any sense to you, the reader of this review, read this book if you get the chance.
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