On the 100th anniversary of John Wayne's birth, the Duke still swaggers through the American psyche as not just an actor, but a patriot _ his centennial spawning fond remembrance, and perhaps a few small protests on the side.Wayne's legacy is unique because of the...

Conrad Black, the brash media mogul who vacationed in Bora Bora, rode around London in a Rolls Royce and ended up convicted of swindling shareholders out of millions of dollars, is headed for prison where inmates are paid 12 cents an hour for such jobs...

When Ernest Gann is at the top of his game, as he was last year in "The High and the Mighty," he is very, very good indeed. When he is in something less than top form, as in this new adventure story, the seams in his cleverly stitched plots begin to show. For he is one of the leading current creators of the formula school of novel—of the Novel of Precarious Situation. Despite the vigor of his observation and the unfailing accuracy of his technical detail, a Gann novel must rise or fall ...

"The High and the Mighty" is a novel which is notable on two counts—as an eminently entertaining addition both to one of the oldest and to one of the most recent branches of storytelling. The most recent is the literature of flight, of which the first-rate examples seem very few when it is remembered that the year 1953 will mark a full half century since Wilbur and Orville Wright achieved the supposedly impossible at Kitty Hawk. But even if the literature of flight were considerably ric...

There is nothing stingy about Ernest K. Gann's sense of melodrama in his new novel, "The High and the Mighty." The serious reader, if he hasn't already jet-propelled himself elsewhere, will, of course, find a twenty-second character aboard who lends a somber note to the hectic doings on plane 420: his name is Death. "The High and the Mighty" is, in a sense, a study of men and women on the edge of destruction (aren't they always?), of the thoughts they think a...