[I've been
reading]
The Last of the Bush Pilots

The Niceville public library had a section where they were giving away paperback books. These were not books in the booksale, these were free. I took two and when I found they were both about the same again, about MY age, I realized that they were probably weeding books that didn’t circulate that were more than 40 years old. This book was great. It tells stories from the bush pilot years, when Alaska was still much more of a frontier and before there were commercial airline flights to much of the country.

The stories the author, himself a bush pilot, tells are even more poignant when you realize that the world he describes [including knowing people who were in Alaska when Will Rogers' plane crashed there] is even more distant now than when the book was written. I enjoyed a lot of his stories of early explorations, Alaska wildlife and natural scenes, and narratives about how some of the small native villages became bigger towns and cities. This is not a great book to read while you’re on an airplane however since many of the early bush pilots' lives we cut short by plane crashes.