Sagittarius Rising

by Cecil Lewis

Book Overview

One of the classics of World War I literature, and generally considered one of the finest air memoirs of the war, Sagittarius Rising brings to life the illustrious career of the passionate fighter pilot once described by Bernard Shaw as "a thinker, a master of words, and a bit of a poet". At a time when flight was still in its infancy Cecil Lewis was amongst the brave, pioneering pilots who took to the skies during the First World War to become the...

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0809496003
• ISBN13: 9780809496006
• Release Date: January 1991
• Publisher: Time Life Medical
• Length: 331 Pages
• Weight: 1.38 lbs.

Customer Reviews

Amazing story from the early years of flight

The English are a wonderfully fascinating race. You learn about the characters that people their recent history, and you wonder how they ever won a war, let alone participate in the defeat of Germany twice. Their soldiers seem somewhat daffy and confused, not to say muddled, and they can't design a good tank or airplane (with a few exceptions) to save their lives. One thing they can do, however, is write books about their experiences afterwards. From Lawrence of Arabia to Robert Graves to Stanley Moss and Cecil Lewis, these accounts are invariably intelligently written and almost poetic in their content.Cecil Lewis lived a very long and full life. He was still around to write the forward for the 50th anniversary edition of his 1936 memoir of his World War I service, the present volume titled Sagittarius Rising. He survived until 1997 (when he was 98) living in the Meditterranean. However, his early life was fraught with danger, and the odds were against him surviving that long. He joined the Royal Flying Corps just short of 17 in 1915, and served through two years of combat on the Western front. He piloted a Morane Parasol (a type of plane, so called because it looked like a parasol from the side) as an observation plane over the Battle of the Somme, then was part of Albert Ball's squadron of SE5's during 1917, and was there when Ball was killed. He then served in a squadron defending Britain from German bombers, flying a Sopwith Camel, and transferred back to France again, just as the war ended, flying that same Camel.The book then does lose focus slightly, as the author has determined to tell you of his experiences flying. He flew planes (intermittently) for several years after the war, mostly in the Far East, where he taught Chinese pilots how to pilot airplanes. Between language problems and the lack of a need for airplane service in China, the whole project was a failure, and he returned home at the end of 1921 and retired from flying airplanes.My edition of this book is from the Folio Society, and came with some pencil drawings of the air war that were appropriate. It also included a forward that filled you in on the author's life after the book a little bit (he was in the RAF during WW2, and commanded an airbase in England). I would recommend this book to anyone interested in the First World War or aviation.

"The Right Stuff - generation ONE"

What a lovely, poetic book. We are lucky to have had someone so gifted in prose be able to witness, and hence document, those giddy and terrifying experiences being an airman in WW I.Those wonderful primitive planes, flown by men who clearly "pushed the envelope" decades before our test pilots made that a well-known expression. This is memoir as literature; it is beautifully written with haunting and evocative phrasing. He knows how to write thrilling action pieces, as the dogfights have a "you are there" quality most authors fail to achieve.Lewis sprinkles in some philosophy (his father's influence), and the parts about technology and warfare are particularly striking given what's happening in the world today.The book straddles pro-war and anti-war sentiments so fairly and soberly, it should be required reading for everyone. I mean everyone.Junior high kids to college students to grandparents. It's one of those books so well written, it reads effortlessly. I can't recommend this more highly.

Quite Simply - The Best WWI Aviation Memoir

In 'Sagittarius Rising', Cecil Lewis creates one of the most beautiful memoirs of a WWI aviator. His style of writing is both poetic and exciting and completely engages the reader from the first page. Anybody who has an interest in aviation, warefare or stolen innocence will find the book captivating.

A Masterpiece

_Sagittarius Rising_ is the greatest book yet written about wartime aviation. The author, Cecil Lewis, became a bud of George B. Shaw, T.E. Lawrence and Robert Graves. (If you judge people by their friends, this is a good group.) WWI junkies might be interested in Lewis' view of Captain Albert Ball and his world. It is true that little of the book deals with battles against the "Red Baron" but it does deal the magic of aviation at its beginning when it was brutalized by war less than 12 years after the Wright Brothers. I consider this one of the greatest war memoirs of the century and hope that some enlightened publisher (or new E-publisher) makes it available for new readers.

A most unlikely book about war

This uplifting, sometimes vain, sometimes extraordinarily poetic book, is a most unlikely book about war. For a start, Lewis had no right to survive the war over which he flew so many times, let alone live until 1993 or so, and a very advanced age. Nor is it about the war we think we know ourselves, down there in the awful trenches of the Somme. It is a silvery, unreal sort of war, much of the time. A thread-like clinging to existence pervades the story at times, as though Lewis knows, even years afterwards, that he had been asking for too much, and having won it, should now keep a low profile lest the fates remember him suddenly and deal him a mortal blow. Just as our own knowledge of what really happened in that faraway war is fairly murky (in spite of the immense amount of documentation), so Lewis, coming back to it via his log books many years later, has no clear memory of particular events. Just of flying, flying ever onwards, one sortie after another, with the occasional scare marking the passing of months, but little else. Except for the empty seats in the Mess, one suspects that it was all fairly dreamy for this 18 or 19-year-old lad, of whom much was indeed being asked too soon.I enjoyed the book. I liked its ups and downs. I was very impressed about finding such writing coming from one who had every reason to shut up altogether, as so many of his contemporaries did. It has been called (by whom? - Shaw perhaps) one of the six best books to come out of World War I. I haven't read them all, but I'd have to agree that it is a fine book, even though it shudders at times, on the wing. It scarcely matters - what is good about it is in fact remarkable - the poetry of the air, particularly. I'm just grateful that one who had that very unique viewpoint, at a time when aircraft were going slow enough for their human passengers to be able to think, survived to share it with us. It couldn't have been written about any other period and, probably, by any other writer. That may just make it unique.