So recently, I’ve been travelling in both place and time. I set the book aside until I felt comfortable traveling again. Her paragraphs, each an ode to a different mode or aspect or manner or consequence of movement, began to feel like barbs to me, stuck in place as I was. I was halfway through it, loving the rhythms of its travels, when the pandemic locked us in place last March. But the truth is that I only read half of Tokarczuk’s book. I agree with her on the transformative importance of mobility and its frequent consequences, curiosity and empathy. They simply go to destinations or conduct raids,” she writes in Flights. “Fluidity, mobility, illusoriness-these are precisely the qualities that make us civilised.

She is the author of The Other Side of Paradise: Life in the New Cuba, and the daughter of a former Pan Am executive.There’s a quote I included in my book, Come Fly the World: The Women of Pan Am at War and Peace, from author Olga Tokarczuk. Finally, with Operation Babylift-the dramatic evacuation of 2,000 children during the fall of Saigon-the book's special cast of stewardesses unites to play an extraordinary role on the world stage.Ībout the Author: JULIA COOKE's journalism has been published in Time, Smithsonian, and Condé Nast Traveler. Cooke brings to light the story of Pan Am stewardesses' role in the Vietnam War, as the airline added runs from Saigon to Hong Kong for planeloads of weary young soldiers straight from the battlefields, who were off for five days of R&R, and then flown back to war. Glamour, danger, liberation: in a Mad Men-era of commercial flight, Pan Am World Airways attracted the kind of young woman who wanted out, and wanted up Required to have a college education, speak two languages, and possess the political savvy of a Foreign Service officer, a jet-age stewardess serving on iconic Pan Am between 19 also had to be between 5′3' and 5′9', between 105 and 140 pounds, and under 26 years of age at the time of hire.Cooke's intimate storytelling weaves together the real-life stories of a memorable cast of characters, from small-town girl Lynne Totten, a science major who decided life in a lab was not for her, to Hazel Bowie, one of the relatively few Black stewardesses of the era, as they embraced the liberation of their new jet-set life.

Come fly with me julia cooke