Rinker Buck, Flight of Passage (Hyperion, 1998, 351 pp)

 A book I would never have picked up without the warm recommendation of Rick Cendo, who selected it for the Amigos book club in Green Valley -- and one I found fascinating.  Buck recounts his adventure decades earlier when, at 15, he joined his 17 year old brother to fly from New Jersey to southern California in a single-engine Piper Cub that the brothers had bought and meticulously restored through the winter.  Buck writes with affection about his eccentric father, a former stunt pilot who gave up that activity after a crash that left him with leg injuries and mobility restrictions, but whose high-level position as an editor at Life magazine enabled him to support any number of hobbies and activities for his nine children, including flying.  Rinker and his brother set out without instruments, without a radio, navigating on the basis of maps, assisted at airfields across the country by the aging airmen who hang out there.  There are hilarious stories such as playing chicken on an Arizona highway with a Greyhound bus.  Buck writes with vivid detail (and amazing recall of details).