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Saturday Review This fascinating, well-told autobiography is a complete refutation of the comfortable cliché that "man is master of his fate." As far as pilots are concerned, fate (or death) is a hunter who is constantly in pursuit of them....There is nothing depressing about Fate Is the Hunter. There is tension and suspense in it but there is great humor too. Happily, Gann never gets too technical for the layman to understand. -- Review

Review
V.S. PritchettNew StatesmanMr. Gann is a writer saturated in his subject; he has the skill to make every instant sharp and important and we catch the fever to know that documentary writing does not often invite.

The New YorkerThis book is an episodic log of some of the more memorable of [the author's] nearly ten thousand hours aloft in peace and (as a member of the Air Transport Command) in war. It is also an attempt to define by example his belief in the phenomenon of luck -- that "the pattern of anyone fate is only partly contrived by the individual."

New York Times Book ReviewFew writers have ever drawn their readers so intimately into the shielded sanctum of the cockpit, and it is here that Mr. Gann is truly the artist.

Cornelius Ryanauthor of A Bridge Too Far and The Longest DayFate Is the Hunter is partly autobiographical, partly a chronicle of some of the most memorable and courageous pilots the reader will ever encounter in print; and always this book is about the workings of fate....The book is studded with characters equally as memorable as the dramas they act out.

Saturday ReviewThis fascinating, well-told autobiography is a complete refutation of the comfortable cliché that "man is master of his fate." As far as pilots are concerned, fate (or death) is a hunter who is constantly in pursuit of them....There is nothing depressing about Fate Is the Hunter. There is tension and suspense in it but there is great humor too. Happily, Gann never gets too technical for the layman to understand.

Chicago Sunday TribuneThis purely wonderful autobiographical volume is the best thing on flying and the meaning of flying that we have had since Antoine de Saint-Exupéry took us aloft on his winged prose in the late 1930s and early 1940s....It is a splendid and many-faceted personal memoir that is not only one man's story but the story, in essence, of all men who fly.

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Customer Reviews

The GREATEST aviation book ever written
This is without a doubt the greatest aviation book ever written! I was first introduced to it more than twenty years ago as I began my airline career, and have reread it many times since. Fate Is The Hunter is an extraordinarily well written insight into the art of flying an airliner. It is a must read (and reread!) for any airline pilot worth flying with. I buy every copy I find to give to pilots I have the pleasure of sharing a cockpit with.

Bored By Fate
This book reads about as exiting as the monotone drone of a window box fan on a hot sweaty summer night. Gann's style seems didactic to say the least. Muddling through the first chapter I fell asleep and woke up just in time to learn of a near miss in the plane Gann was flying. However in all fairness, most books are written like this, full of details and tangents before coming to the point. Who can get through Moby Dick or Les Miserables without wondering where the authors are going? One should only read books like these if he has a bad case of insomia.

If one is looking for the plot to the movie: Fate Is The Hunter, forget it. This book has almost nothing in common with the excellent screenplay written by Harold Maud except for the title and some flashbacks. Of course it is always a disappointment when the movies don't follow the books, which are usually better than the movies; this case being one of the exceptions.

The paperback book is not an abridged version of the hardcover. So don't try searching for a used copy as I did. It's just a waste of time and money. Quite frankly, I'm sorry I bought the book.

Fate Above All.
Flight possesses a seductive mystique and "Fate is the Hunter" is one of the few books that has ever really truly captured flight's essence.

It is not only pilots that look skyward at the sound of an aircraft or slow down a little as they drive past an airfield. Similarly, Gann captures what is almost intangible and presents it to the reader with an immaculate style that will engross all who read it.

Gann carefully blends the worlds of the philosophical and aeronautical. In this mix, the reader looks out from the cockpit to at times see better within themselves.

A true classic.

Owen Zupp. Author: "Down to Earth"

www.owenzupp.com
DOWN TO EARTH: A Fighter Pilot's Experiences of Surviving Dunkirk, The Battle of Britain, Dieppe and D-Day