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...

Mr. Gann's novel of German and French aviators in the First World War ["The Company of Eagles"] is extremely disappointing. Considering the author, whose talent and skill were proved in "The High and the Mighty," and considering the time, the place, the circumstances, and the personalities of the two heroes involved, it should have been a very exciting and affecting story. The year is 1917, but the fifty years that have passed since then have skimped Mr. Gann's pers...

Mr. Gann's characters [in The High and the Mighty] are types—the overage pilot, the perceptive stewardess, the sinister passenger—but they are not automatons … The title, one would think, is meant to be taken ironically: the crew and passengers on the flight from Hawaii to San Francisco may be high, but they are anything but mighty by the time Mr. Gann is through with them. With the assurance of complete technical knowledge, the author takes the plane up, then gets it into seriou...

Author of "The High and the Mighty" and other bestsellers, Gann falls short of expectations in ["The Aviator."] It is gripping where it focuses on flying in its infancy during the 1920s and on pioneers who took the wild risks that made aviation a reality, but it only occasionally succeeds as an adventure tale. In 1928, pilot Jerry takes off northward, carrying the mail and a passenger, 11-year-old Heather. Suddenly, the plane falters and Jerry crashes into mountainous terrain. Bo...