No Visible Horizon Surviving the World&39s Most Dangerous Sport [Paperback]

In a good year aerobatics is one of the most beautiful sports imaginable. Pilots pull through impossibly elegant figures at hundreds of miles an hour. In a bad year no sport kills more of its participants. To fly really well and to win you must depart the land of the possible and enter a place of pure faith. In this stunning literary debut, Joshua Cooper Ramo has crafted a meditation on the seduction of flight and a passionate love letter to a life of risk.Joshua Cooper Ramowas raised in Los Ranchos, New Mexico, on the Rio Grande River. He began flying in his late teens and holds two national point-to-point airspeed records. He joinedTimein 1996 as the youngest senior editor in the magazine's history and went on to become its foreign editor and assistant managing editor. He is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and the World Economic Forum's Global Leaders of Tomorrow, as well as a Crown Fellow of the Aspen Institute and a cofounder of the U.S.-China Young Leaders Forum.Chapter One

In the middle of the fifteenth century in Japan, a time when the kingdom was both at its most isolated and, to Japanese eyes, most perfect, a strange tradition emerged: composing haiku as you died, at the very moment of death. Perhaps it wasn't so surprising. Japanese culture had become obsessed with the relationship between life and art. There was an increasing belief that the two should never be separated, that a well-lived life was a work of art. Was it surprising that some Japanese poets wanted to try to weave the two together, to make a little tatami of life and art? What better time than at the moment of death? After a lifetime of study, could you be beautiful in three lines? Could you be perfect? Could you reduce it, all of it, your life, down to seventeen syllables?

Mame de iyo

mi wa narawashi no

kusa no tsuyu

Farewell...I

pass as all things do

dew on the grass.

So it all awaited you. Spels8