Interweaving observation and dream, Takeoff is a meditation on flying. Its eight chapters carry the reader up to the clouds, into a world governed by different laws, where as we look through the cockpit window - and into our own souls - we see the earth below, and into our own lives, from a new angle and with a painful new clarity. Whether he is reliving his first solo flight, the mysterious disappearance of an airliner, or the adrenaline-charged lives of Italian torpedo bombers in World War II, del Giudice focuses on the edge of experience where one learns to take nothing for granted.