Book review: 'The Skies Belong to Us', by Brendan Koerner

by Brendan Koerner Crown

Hector Tobar

The freewheeling, hijacking-crazy days of the 1960s and early '70s come to life vividly in Brendan Koerner's evocative new page-turner. With abundant research and a sharp eye for the absurd, Koerner transports us to a time long before anyone thought of crashing planes into buildings,

Hijacking was an American spectator sport. People commandeered planes for just about any reason - and the media often made them folk heroes. The rogues' gallery of hijackers included "frazzled veterans, chronic fabulists, compulsive gamblers, bankrupt businessmen, thwarted academics, career felons and even lovesick teens", Koerner writes. The Skies Belong to Us is a lively and often funny account peppered with dumb criminals and feckless officials. In that bygone and more innocent age, the airlines would accede to almost any crazy demand to keep passengers from getting hurt and airplanes from being damaged, though they stubbornly refused to spend the funds and endure the hassle of installing metal detectors at airports.

All that began to change, Koerner argues, thanks in part to one especially colourful pair of young lovers who carried out one of the boldest takeovers of an airplane in US history.

At first blush, Roger Holder and Cathy Kerkow were a most unlikely pair of hijackers. Holder was an African-American Vietnam veteran whose war experience left him troubled, adrift and in debt; Kerkow was a white masseuse and small-time drug dealer.

In Koerner's sensitive and entirely convincing portrayal - drawn from legal documents, news accounts and interviews - Holder and Kerkow are romantic outcasts. They're in their early 20s, and they've admired such groups as the Black Panthers and the Weathermen without ever engaging in a political act themselves.