Лучшие книги Уолтера Керна

Райан, герой романа американского писателя Уолтера Керна "Мне бы в небо" по долгу службы все свое время проводит в самолетах. Его работа заключается в том, чтобы увольнять служащих корпораций, чье начальство не желает брать на себя эту неприятную задачу. Ему нравится жить между небом и землей, не имея ни привязанностей, ни обязательств, ни личной жизни. При этом Райан и сам намерен сменить работу, как только наберет миллион бонусных миль в авиакомпании, которой он пользуется. Но за несколько дней, предшествующих торжественному моменту, жизнь его внезапно меняется...

Ryan Bingham's job as a Career Transition Counselor -which is a fancy way of saying that he fires people - has kept him airborne for years. Although he hates his job, he feels at home in "Airworld" and likes the dry recycled airport air, tasteless plane food and anonymous hotel rooms. With a letter of resignation on his boss's desk, and the hope of a new job on the horizon, Ryan is agonizingly close to his ultimate goal, his Holy Grail: one million frequent flyer miles.

This eighties-centric, Ritalin-fueled, pitch-perfect comic novel by a writer to watch brings energy and originality to the classic Midwestern coming-of-age story.Meet Justin Cobb, "the King Kong of oral obsessives" (as his dentist dubs him) and the most appealingly bright and screwed-up fictional adolescent since Holden Caulfield donned his hunter's cap. For years, no remedy--not orthodontia, not the escalating threats of his father, Mike, a washed-out linebacker turned sporting goods entrepreneur, not the noxious cayenne pepper-based Suk-No-Mor--can cure Justin's thumbsucking habit.Then a course of hypnosis seemingly does the trick, but true to the conservation of neurotic energy, the problem doesn't so much disappear as relocate. Sex, substance abuse, speech team, fly-fishing, honest work, even Mormonism--Justin throws himself into each pursuit with a hyperactive energy that even his daily Ritalin dose does little to blunt.Each time, however, he discovers that there is no escaping the unruly imperatives of his self and the confines of his deeply eccentric family. The only "cure" for the adolescent condition is time and distance.Always funny, sometimes hilariously so, occasionally poignant, and even disturbing, deeply wise on the vexed subject of fathers and sons, Walter Kirn's Thumbsucker is an utterly fresh and all-American take on the painful process of growing up.

Ryan Bingham's job as a Career Transition Counselor-he fires people-has kept him airborne for years. Although he has come to despise his line of work, he has come to love the culture of what he calls "Airworld," finding contentment within pressurized cabins, anonymous hotel rooms, and a wardrobe of wrinkle-free slacks. With a letter of resignation sitting on his boss's desk, and the hope of a job with a mysterious consulting firm, Ryan Bingham is agonizingly close to his ultimate goal, his Holy Grail: one million frequent flier miles. But before he achieves this long-desired freedom, conditions begin to deteriorate.
With perception, wit, and wisdom, Up in the Air combines brilliant social observation with an acute sense of the psychic costs of our rootless existence, and confirms Walter Kirn as one of the most savvy chroniclers of American life.