“Cities—home to so many of us—need champions who believe in them. Mark Vanhoenacker has crafted an eloquent personal tribute to them in Imagine a City, a love song to cities the world over…he writes as someone who, from a very early age—looking at a metal globe—wanted to explore the world, to get to know it all, to touch it, so to speak, everywhere.”
“A memoir wrapped within a scholarly travel book...dreamy and erudite...a most likeable, warm-hearted narrator with an original world view”
“A love letter to the cities he’s returned to again and again...Vanhoenacker captivates when describing the silent beauty of a world glimpsed from above.”
“Combines the god’s eye view... with street-by-street detail. The book will enchant and even move anyone who feared in recent years for the future of both travel and urbanism.”
UK EDITION
U.S. EDITION
A Book of the Year
NPR • Waterstones • Kirkus • MSN • Air Mail
“Vanhoenacker is exceptionally well travelled, and an exceptionally curious and widely read observer... he doesn’t waste an hour, and with every return his engagement with each city deepens. ”
“While Vanhoenacker takes us on fascinating journeys to Brasília and Cape Town, Liverpool and Jeddah, this is not just a travelogue of the cities in which he lands. Instead, Imagine a City becomes a philosophical interrogation of what home means and how we might shape it in our minds to be a place of succour and safety.”
“Part memoir, part travelogue, part history, Imagine a City is all entrancing...” ”
“An inviting new volume that gives new meaning to the notion of the view from 42,000 feet... Imagine a City is, to be sure, a travelogue; in its pages the reader visits Seoul, Rio de Janeiro, Venice, Delhi … and Pittsburgh. It also is a primer on piloting a massive aircraft; some passages place you squarely in the cockpit, bearing down on a runway in a faraway place. It is, too, an examination of the obverse side of getting the urge for going; sometimes it is the urge for going home, even if you can never go home again.”
“Visit some of the world’s great cities from the comfort of your armchair, with Mark Vanhoenacker as your tour guide… a sure-handed navigator... Vanhoenacker has the benefit of making short but frequent visits to lots of places, with a pocketful of foreign currencies and a backpack brimming with curiosity.”
“What makes this captain of the heavens so appealing is a kind of all-American innocence that helps him savor “the palmistry of lit streets” in Salt Lake City, seen from 38,000 feet above, as eagerly as he devours the poets of Delhi when touching down for 48 hours. Linking the places he flies between through snow, or gates, or the color blue, Vanhoenacker….. seems to have a near-bottomless appetite for fresh sights and guidebook curiosities.
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“Mark Vanhoenacker is a beautiful, lyrical writer who uses his experience as a pilot to bring us constantly in touch with the transcendent and the otherworldly. Imagine a City is a journey around both the author’s mind and the planet’s great cities that leaves us energised, open to new experiences and ready to return more hopefully to our lives.”
“Unfailingly interesting, full of empathetic details on faraway places and lives...an absolute pleasure for any world citizen and a trove for any traveler…a sparkling addition to the literature of flight.”
“A moving reflection on the meaning of home…a dazzling trip…a taste of the high life that informs and awes in equal measure.”
“A century ago, at the dawn of flight, people imagined that writers would want to become pilots, and vice versa, because of the revelations that come with seeing the Earth from above. Mark Vanhoenacker’s elegant, engrossing book shows the power of these twinned perspectives, from the skies and up close at ground level. Readers who have not yet traveled with him at the controls of a 787 will be grateful to accompany him on the journeys in these pages.”
“What makes Mark Vanhoenacker’s Imagine a City such a joy, then, is that this is a travel book entirely rooted in modernity and globalization...but which nonetheless retains the wide-eyed wonder, not so much of a 19th-century explorer as of a medieval pilgrim.”
“Equal parts guidebook, memoir and reflection on some of the world’s great cities…globetrotters, armchair travelers, historians and even urban planners will find something to like in this engaging and elegantly written book...the book will push you to dream of far off places and remind you the world is still worth discovering.”
“An enriching memoir of how a sensitive boy’s yearning for escape and acceptance found its fulfilment in the life of an airline pilot... A touching survey of human dreams and endeavours and a hymn to the quiet pleasures of returning, in the flesh or in memory, to the intimate geography of one’s hometown.”
“Refreshingly personal and moving… This absorbing modern twist on the age-old story of flying the nest, yet yearning for home, will transport you around the globe and back again without leaving your seat.”
“Mark Vanhoenacker is a long-haul commercial pilot, and his 787 Dreamliner—a very apt name—takes him to all the cities he dreamed of as a boy in small-town America (and many more). His perspective—from the cockpit, on the ground, and through the lens of retrospection—defies easy comparison: imagine a coming-of-age memoir and shrewdly picaresque travelogue told by Jules Verne, E. B. White, and Jan Morris rolled into one.”
“Imagine a City is an utterly remarkable and original travel book. Like Jan Morris and Pico Iyer, Vanhoenacker weaves memoir and travelogue, using his unusual perch as a pilot to take us on an incredible journey to dozens of cities around the world. Like Italo Calvino, he somehow weaves it all into one, a painfully beautiful cubist city of memory and dreams that rises out of his warm and lyrical prose.”
“If the child is the father of the man, then ‘the hometown is like a mother tongue.’ Mark Vanhoenacker takes us on a journey to major metropolises all over the earth on a quest to find the hidden personal geographies revealed in faraway and unfamiliar parks, cathedrals, marketplaces, or seashores . . . A tour de force of descriptive power and honesty; I can think of no other book like this one.”
“Most of us look at cities from the ground up, but Mark Vanhoenacker, a pilot, looks at them from above. And his journeys enable him to drop in and visit and revisit cities across the world. Imagine a City provides a unique and much-needed perspective of the cities and the urban world we live in.”
“Imagine a City is really about home...a variation on the Great Expectations narrative, with our young hero feeling uncomfortable where he grows up, flying the nest for a series of transformative experiences but discovering he can never quite leave home nor fully return”