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, meticulous enough to offer a 16-page bibliography, seems to have a near-bottomless appetite for fresh sights and guidebook curiosities.

Mark Vanhoenacker has crafted an eloquent personal tribute to [cities].

Imagine a City is, to be sure, a travelogue.

[Vanhoenacker's] intricately structured text offers several episodes that present us with memorable images of the world as experienced from the cockpit.

Imagine a City is a memoir wrapped within a scholarly travel book, at its heart a moving account of personal unbelonging. Vanhoenacker’s home city was Pittsfield, situated so high in Massachusetts that the local ski slope produced Olympic champions...He’s opaque about the trauma of his parents’ divorce when he was 16, but it was obviously profound...Biographical stuff is woven within meditative themes about the destinations he has explored so often — cities of air, snow, poetry, signs, gates, rivers, the colour blue; and every city bears a story, threads of memory, friendship or adventure...Imagine a City is rich with random facts...Geeky fans will be glad to know that he’s still flying — during lockdown Vanhoenacker flew cargo in 747s, then retrained on the 787 — but this book is not Skyfaring 2...There’s the occasional snapshot from the cockpit, but Imagine a City is not about aviation; it’s something more dreamy and erudite, a slightly reticent personal journey in which I’d have preferred more memoir, less city detail...He remains, however, a most likeable, warm-hearted narrator with an original world view..

Like jet travel itself, the tour is sometimes disorienting. You go to bed reading a chapter about Jeddah and wake up to find yourself in Delhi. But Vanhoenacker is a sure-handed navigator, filling in the gaps with history, poetry, and lots of local color.

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, and thus unbothered by belatedness, but which nonetheless retains the wide-eyed wonder, not so much of a 19th-century explorer as of a medieval pilgrim.

Travel writing from this perspective offers unique insights, and Vanhoenacker draws on poetry and history to add further dimension to his memoir..

The text is often erudite and poetic. Beautiful imagery and historical facts abound in chapters loosely organized around themes like air and prospects. Vanhoenacker’s initial impressions of cities—particularly during descent—are what makes this lengthy book most appealing. There are buried treasures, such as the discussion of the ocean’s many shades of blue, best seen from an airplane. The author’s exploration of his ongoing struggle with coming out lends some tenderness to the sometimes-lofty musings. But there is also a sense of disconnection as Vanhoenacker jogs and drinks coffee alone during his 48-hour layovers.

As a young boy surrounded by model planes, Vanhoenacker fell under the spell not only of aviation, but also of far-off destinations...Vanhoenacker began piloting long-haul jets all around the world, and he takes readers to Kuala Lumpur, Cape Town, Brasília, Jeddah, Sapporo, and numerous other places that may be exotic or familiar but that he views through a singular lens...Vanhoenacker is a collector of sumptuous details such as the 'imperfect radii or broken spokes' of London’s layout and the difficulties he faced learning Japanese...Philosophically rich without being ponderous, belonging on the same shelf as books by Saint-Exupéry, Markham, and Langewiesche, Vanhoenacker’s book is unfailingly interesting, full of empathetic details on faraway places and lives. It’s an absolute pleasure for any world citizen and a trove for any traveler...A sparkling addition to the literature of flight..

Gazing through the windshield of his 787, commercial airline pilot Vanhoenacker conjures the beauty of cities around the globe in this moving reflection on the meaning of home...After recalling his childhood in 1980s Pittsfield, Mass.—when his yearning to escape home for 'skyscrapers, glittering lights, sweeping roads, a busy harbor, an airport (or three)' first took off—Vanhoenacker takes readers on a dazzling trip through hundreds of locales he’s traversed in his past two decades as a pilot...As he marvels at the locales he’s visited, Vanhoenacker offers a taste of the high life that informs and awes in equal measure. Jet-setters will be enthralled..