Mark Vanhoenacker, "Imagine a City: A Pilot's Journey Across the Urban World" (Knopf, 2022)

How does a pilot see the cities of the world? Unlike residents, who live there full-time, or tourists, who travel once and perhaps never again, pilots are brief, but regular visitors to the hubs of the world.

In Imagine a City: A Pilot's Journey Across the Urban World (Chatto & Windus / Knopf: 2022), Mark Vanhoenacker helps to give us an answer. In his book, Mark charts his flights all over the world, to cities like Hong Kong, Jeddah, Rio, Cape Town, Sapporo, Delhi, and many more. But the book also regularly returns to his home town: Pittsfield, Mass., near the state border with New York.

In this interview, Mark and I talk about his travels around the world, from the (relatively) small town of Pittsfield to the snowy streets of Sapporo.

Mark Vanhoenacker is a commercial airline pilot and writer. The author of the international best seller Skyfaring: A Journey with a Pilot (Knopf: 2015) and How to Land a Plane (The Experiment: 2019), he is also a regular contributor to The New York Times and a columnist for the Financial Times. Born in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, he trained as a historian and worked in business before starting his flight training in Britain in 2001. He now flies the Boeing 787 Dreamliner from London to cities around the world.

You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of Imagine a City. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia.

Nicholas Gordon is an associate editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon.

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