BALL, John - Last Plane Out - (Hardcover in Wrapper)

 Book excellent wrapper good - 252 pg. - Wrapper now in removable plastic sleeve.   >>> There are two parts with an affiliating epilogue featuring the same personnel taking off originally from Casablanca to Miami on the Last Plane Out at the end of World War II. They add to the manifest a Jewish chaplain, a station-master at the base called Bixby who was ""born sneering at his mother,"" and a Moroccan girl, Odette, who worked there and would be destined to an even greater degradation and destitution than seems possible even now. Between the captain and the chaplain, Bixby's meanness is worked out and he salvages the girl by marrying her. In the second story, during a commercial crash, a passenger who is a pilot but missed out on all the action he so wanted takes over. And in the third and last coda he's given a chance to fly. . . . Under the wingspan, the expected solid action, considerably softer sentiment and you'll be on safe ground in recommending it to Ball's alternate Rescue Mission (1966) readership, or say some of Arthur Halley's. (Kirkus)    >>>   This is the gripping, compelling saga of men and their machines and their lonely women. Men who have only one goalget up in the sky in anything that flies !   -   The Captaina man not to be grounded, determined to fly the last plane out of the war; Jenningssurvivor of a terrifying crash, who kept his eyes turned to the skies all his life; The copilots, navigators, technicians, ground crewsand the two young women who tie together the threads of their lives.   -   They could live no other way.   >>>    "As exciting a story of adventure in the sky as anything ever given us..."    Chicago Tribune